Some scientists, he says, have tended to accept dramatic scenarios and consequences even when there’s little evidence behind them. He also talks of a group of scientists who fancy themselves as the ultimate authority and who have the last word. All the exaggerations and projections of doom, gloom and disaster have led to an overall discrediting of the field.

I was surprised to hear him call both Science and Nature “pretty bad journals” when it comes to the quality of their articles. He says that science journals must remain sufficiently critical and not let themselves get caught up with the zeitgeist.

Overall von Storch doesn’t blame the media much for the hysteria, implying that the hysteria stems more from scientists communicating poorly.

von Storch believes some scientists succumbed to drama in order to get attention and prestige, and says that the such are only damaging the credibility of climate science.

He finds climate models too CO2-centric in general. Here he appeals for more patience to let the science unfold.

On the hockey stick chart:

I believe it was something dumb by scientists who wanted to steer politics.”

Scientists, von Storch reminds us, should not be so quick to claim absolute truth.

Also, von Storch believes that the oceans could be warming up, but that there is very little data out there to confirm it.

Mann vs Muller

In the last two months, Richard Muller has published two op-eds in the NYTimes

Michael Mann is upset, esp since the pause op-ed contains a dig at the hockey stick. So Michael Mann has an op-ed published in the Huffington Post: Something is rotten at the New York Times. The gist of Mann’s critique of Muller’s hurricane argument is this:

Muller, who lacks any training or expertise in atmospheric science, is more than happy to promote with great confidence the unsupportable claim that global warming will actually decrease tornado activity. His evidence for this? The false claim that the historical data demonstrate a decreasing trend in past decades.

So one is essentially left with the physical reasoning I outlined above. You would think that a physicist would know how to do some physical reasoning. And sadly, in Muller’s case, you would apparently be wrong…

Mann loses this argument. The undercounting of tornadoes is a problem prior to 1990 (worse undercounting as you go back in time); hence a decrease in recent hurricanes relative to historical values cannot be attributed to undercounting.

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Since Mann should be rightly concerned that his scientific arguments are weak, he then tries to convince the reader that Muller is wrong by doing a hatchet job on Muller. This is an extensive hatchet job, you have to read it in full to appreciate it, here is the punchline:

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And while Muller has now admitted that the Earth had warmed and that human-activity is largely to blame, he has used his new-found limelight and access to the media to:

Smear and misrepresent other scientists.

Misrepresent key details of climate science, inevitably to downplay the seriousness of climate change, whether it is the impacts on extreme weather and heat, drought, Arctic melting, or the threat to Polar Bears.

Shill for fossil fuel energy, arguing that the true solution to global warming isn’t renewable or clean energy. No, not at all! Muller is bullish on fracking and natural gas as the true solution.

To (a) pretend to accept the science, but attack the scientists and misrepresent so many important aspect of the science, downplaying the impacts and threat of climate change, while (b) acting as a spokesman for natural gas, one imagines that the petrochemical tycoon Koch Brothers indeed were probably quite pleased with their investment. As I put it in an interview last year:

It would seem that Richard Muller has served as a useful foil for the Koch Brothers, allowing them to claim they have funded a real scientist looking into the basic science, while that scientist– Muller—props himself up by using the “Berkeley” imprimatur (UC Berkeley has not in any way sanctioned this effort) and appearing to accept the basic science, and goes out on the talk circuit, writing op-eds, etc. systematically downplaying the actual state of the science, dismissing key climate change impacts and denying the degree of risk that climate change actually represents. I would suspect that the Koch Brothers are quite happy with Muller right now, and I would have been very surprised had he stepped even lightly on their toes during his various interviews, which he of course has not. He has instead heaped great praise on them, as in this latest interview.

The New York Times does a disservice to its readers when it buys into the contrived narrative of the “honest broker”–Muller as the self-styled white knight who must ride in to rescue scientific truth from a corrupt and misguided community of scientists. Especially when that white knight is in fact sitting atop a Trojan Horse–a vehicle for the delivery of disinformation, denial, and systematic downplaying of what might very well be the greatest threat we have yet faced as a civilization, the threat of human-caused climate change.

I bow to Richard Muller: not only does he have access to the NYTimes, but he has been the subject of numerous lengthy hatchet jobs by Mann, whereas I can only claim a few tweets and the ‘serial climate misinformer’ thing. While I don’t agree with everything he says, clearly Muller is ‘da man’ in terms of of a scientist trying to put some rationality into the climate change debate, and as such is perceived to be a major threat by the wacko alarmist wing of climate science. Next up on the Mann hit list might be Roger Pielke Jr, as indicated by Mann’s twitter feed and also by his post Daniel Greenberg meets the climate scientists). Although von Storch might be in contention; that was some pretty serious trash talking about the Hockey Stick (although since it was in german, maybe it doesn’t ‘count’).

The most amusing thing to me was that in the midst of trashing Muller as not being an atmospheric scientist or understanding climate science, that Mann touts the foreword for the paperback edition of his book The Hockey Stick Wars by Bill Nye – Science Guy (recently seen on Dancing with the Stars)

JC message to Michael Mann: Up the level of your scientific game when discussing climate change with the public. Most importantly, stop trashing other scientists that disagree with you. It reminds the public of Climategate and all of the irresponsible and unethical practices that are the root source of why they don’t trust climate scientists. You continue to damage the credibility of climate science in ways that you apparently can’t imagine.

You should read the entire posts, and the comments are interesting as well. A taste:

Because sceptics are culturally resistant to seeing themselves as victims.

Sceptics are loners … not social loners but intellectual loners. We do not need our views endorsed by our peers. We are resilient, self-reliant we have often worked in time-critical high-risk industries where the pressure of work means that tempers can fly and so we are pragmatic and tolerant of others.

Non-sceptics value group identity. Unlike sceptics they see loners as being weak and needing to be brought into line within the social consensus. As such non-sceptics feel it is legitimate to attack those who reject their social consensus.

But sceptics don’t value their group identity and instead argue the facts.

Such behaviour is extremely frustrating to the non-sceptic. They cannot understand how sceptics can reject their group, but neither can they attack our arguments because we state the facts which cannot be attacked. So non-sceptics find themselves having to attack the people for not arguing in a way that allows us to be attacked.

But, the fundamental reason for this cyber bullying is that in a culture where this bullying has been legitimised by every authority figure from government ministers to the BBC to the moderators of the Independent and Guardian as well as every University in the land

Quote of the day

From Nassim Taleb, via Twitter:

Be polite, but ignore comments, praise, and criticism from people you woudn’t hire.

If you you are on twitter, be sure to follow Taleb, he comes up with these amazingly insightful one-liners.

I spotted this one as I was writing Mann vs Muller. I would hire Richard Muller in a heartbeat. I will be polite and stop there.

“A major U.S. power company has pleaded guilty to killing eagles and other birds at two Wyoming wind farms and agreed to pay $1 million as part of the first enforcement of environmental laws protecting birds against wind energy facilities.”

“Unless and except as permitted by regulations made as hereinafter provided in this subchapter, it shall be unlawful at any time, by any means or in any manner, to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, attempt to take, capture, or kill, possess, offer for sale, sell, offer to barter, barter, offer to purchase, purchase, deliver for shipment, ship, export, import, cause to be shipped, exported, or imported, deliver for transportation, transport or cause to be transported, carry or cause to be carried, or receive for shipment, transportation, carriage, or export, any migratory bird …. ”

This is what the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has to say:

“Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.”

All the species of birds caught by cats are small varieties that generally have two broods of four or more chicks per year, due to the very high mortality rate implied by being at the bottom of the food chain, whereas the typical victims of wind turbines are top predators which typically breed no more than two offspring per year. And you never see a cat catch an eagle, although I suspect more than one eagle has had a cat or two.

Last winter, our bird feeders were patronised by a fair variety of birds, sparrows, robins, blackbirds, assorted tits and finches, etc. Our three cats found them entertaining, but never bothered them. Then the cold and snowy weather drove a sparrowhawk down from the fells into the small town. And that was that. The population of garden birds still hasn’t recovered, I doubt it’s a third of what it was before he appeared. Mind you, he very effectively dealt with the pigeons that were crapping all over the Market Place and the Town Hall.

In any case, this “cats/windows/cars etc. kill more birds than wind turbines so wind turbine kills are OK” argument is entirely spurious. One could equally argue that because traffic accidents kill orders of magnitude more people than serial killers we might as well not bother attempting to apprehend serial killers.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds sounds a bit batty due inbreeding or something. All birds eventually die, so millions of birds dying every year plays little role in considerations of mortality due specific causes. “There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.”

It’s my understanding, more than my hope, that wind farms are doing everything they can technically to curtail deaths due to waving their arms around in the wind. And if they’re causing deaths detectibly above background rates, they certainly ought pay the penalty. Would that pet owners, drivers, glaziers and people who put up utility poles all paid similar penalties. I hope Beth’s pro-EPA stance is shared by prosecutors where chemical emissions and all those other factors more lethal to protected species are concerned. Chikoski (2010) observes, after chemicals like DDT, DDE, PBDE’s, and other bioaccumulators (eg mercury*), after cats and dogs, after collisions with windows or wires, after cars and habitat disruption and extreme weather events, way down the list:

Avian mortality is known to occur at wind energy facilities (Kingsley and Whittam 2001).Mortality due to collisions with wind turbines could have dramatic negative effects on raptor populations because they cannot absorb mortalities on an annual basis as easily as passerine populations can (Kuvlesky et al. 2007). In a study in the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in California, 65 percent of the birds killed were raptors. Studies have shown mortality rates to range from 0.15 to 0.24 birds per turbine per year (Kuvlesky et al. 2007). Fifty-five percent of raptors killed in the California study died as a result of striking a wind turbine, 18 percent from electrocution, 11 percent from collision with wires and 26 percent from undetermined causes (Orloff and Flannery 1992). Where raptor densities are low, mortality is generally lower. Studies conducted at other wind farm developments indicate that collisions with turbines had no or little impact on raptor populations (Kuvlesky et al. 2007). Accurately estimating bird mortality caused by wind turbines is difficult, since scavengers quickly learn to remove carcasses, limiting their detection (Smallwood 2007).

The same type of evidence that weak or sick birds are taken more by cats appears to apply to wind farms, where population density contributes to raptor mortality rate, possibly suggesting the weakest raptors are forced to the least attractive range.

Were the same skepticism applied to wind farm avian mortality as some here apply to AGW, there’d be wind farms popping up in every backyard.

*Just how high, then, are the fines on smokestacks? Birds are much, much more sensitive to chemicals than are people, and we know from epidemiologic evidence that smokestacks harm people.

It seems to me a double standard, to fine the windmill while letting the mercury and sulfate-emitters off without penalty.

And come to think of it, who measures the collisions of eagles with smokestacks?

Not in this part of the World, Bart, up here in the Yorkshire Dales we have farms and food outlets, both of which attract a number of rodents.

My cats catch quite a few mice and the odd rat. My wife’s works cat catches numerous rats, which, as rodents either eat or spoil approximately 10% of the World’s food supplies, is why our cats are not purely pets, but valuable contributors to our economy and public health. So our cats are not only companions and pets, but useful and productive members of our society.

That’s why we and cats formed a symbiotic relationship in the first place, probably some time around the Agricultural Revolution, when we first started storing grain, and the cats’ capability as “roving mini murder machines” came in very handy, and still does, as the Houses of Parliament recently discovered when they banned the House cat for misguided health reasons, and promptly got overrun by mice, so had to reinstate the House cat.

Do not underestimate that we now have an entire generation, or two, of young people who were taught global warming in school as settled science. Most will never visit the issue again in a critical way and thus the battle may never be won (at lest until the Thames freezes in the next Maunder Minima).

So Muller is implicitly connecting the reduction in tornadoes with global climate change? How does he make that connection, and how sure is he that it isn’t just a regional natural variation that will soon oscillate back the other way? Can the skeptics have it both ways: connecting weakenings with climate change, but denying strengthenings are related at all?

Climate changes; the number of tornados that occur from year to year during tornado season changes. Of academic interest I’m sure.

What is NOT of academic interest is that every disruptive climate event is followed instantly by press announcements that the disruptive climate event was the direct consequence of anthropogenic CO2 and that political action must be taken immediately to prevent such disasters in the future. While there is no evidence that the effects of CO2, if any, are anything other than benign, the political actions being implemented to curb CO2 represent a real, existential threat to our civilization. If you disagree, remember the target: Reduce anthropogenic CO2 by 90%–or more. Then review in your mind the effects on our society and our standard of living if the carbon police actually succeed in reaching it. The resulting catastrophe would cause any actual harm attributable anthropogenic CO2 to pale into insignificance.

How you you know that global climate change isn’t just regional natural variation? You were implicitly connecting the increase in surface temperature with CO2 until the correlation weaken then you implicitly connect with OHC until that correlation weakens. Muller is like everyone else, he picks a correlation until it changes then he will pick another.

It is important to be aware that regional changes do occur sometimes, and this could be one. When one area decreases another increases, but dealing with global averages many of these may cancel out. You look at the global surface and global ocean taken together, and find a continuing warming effect as the forcing increases.

With “Global” average you are not really sure that the energy is cancelling out. If the Antarctic warms by 10 degrees and a similar size area in the tropics cools by 5 degrees, the energy is cancelling out but temperature is not. Same thing with land versus oceans.

So regionally things need to be weighted so that energy is considered as well as temperature. If the “Globe warms by 3 degrees due to Arctic warming by 30 degrees in winter from -60C to -30C, who cares? The Arctic on the other hand could warm by 1 degree from -1 to 0C and you have a significant impact.

Global surface temperature especially combined land and oceans was never a good metric.

AGW predicts a combined effect on surface temperature and heat content, so it is _the_ metric for AGW to see what this effect is doing at this point in time. Not looking at both is just “denial”. Looking at one region can’t prove anything, even if Muller wants to say that reducing tornadoes proves that global climate change is occurring (which is logically equivalent but reversing his reasoning), it doesn’t.

JimD, “AGW predicts a combined effect on surface temperature and heat content, so it is _the_ metric for AGW to see what this effect is doing at this point in time. Not looking at both is just “denial”.

Agreed and looking at what fits your agenda at the time is a sign of bias. Probably the best metric based on “global” surface temperature is “global” diurnal temperature range. CO2 related impact would tend to reduce that range somewhat uniformly as an indication of a “global” atmospheric forcing. Decreased DTR would lead to a more uniform surface temperature reducing temperature gradients somewhat which should reduced the number of severe weather events or at least shift those events poleward. There is nothing wrong with Muller’s logic, except for there needs to be more supporting evidence.

Since BEST made the public more aware of the trend in DTR, it has been pretty carefully avoided, possibly because it doesn’t “fit” the high estimates of CO2 forcing impact much like the current trend in TCR indicates CO2equivalent impact was grossly over estimated.

Using ERSST and BEST absolute temperatures that is my approximation of the “global” diurnal temperature trend. “Globally” it hasn’t changed much and it reversed trend around 1985. Just another minor hitch in catastrophic CO2 equivalent forcing caused “Global” warming’s giddyup.
But that really should be expected since the “absolute” average “global” surface temperature doesn’t even consider the DTR, the main indication of an atmospheric forcing impact.

DTR could be increasing because the continents are drying as part of their warming at twice the rate of the oceans. There is no problem with DTR changing this way in a transient climate. In fact it is consistent.

JimD, “DTR could be increasing because the continents are drying as part of their warming at twice the rate of the oceans. There is no problem with DTR changing this way in a transient climate. In fact it is consistent.”

Hard to make it through a day without a rationalization. There is nothing consistent with DTR and CO2 forcing. That would be a problem if you happen to believe that current warming is primarily due to CO2 equivalent forcing. I agree that the shift could be due to land drying since the land hydrology cycle has had more of mankind’s influence and ;likely has a much larger that estimated impact on climate. That however is not “Greenhouse Gas” related warming though it has an impact of the accumulation of “Greenhouse Gases” in the atmosphere.

So what we have is “consistency” which should that add weight to your preferred “cause” is useful or if not ignored.

Bob Ludwick, that is Man’s choice. Business as usual, 700 ppm, 4 C warmer (higher in some regions), rising sea levels, or some other route that needs to be strived for rather than given up on. Skeptics prefer not to even think about finding that other route, and achieve this by denying that 700 ppm is even possibly a problem. It is a very odd mindset that gives the same impression as defeatism on controlling climate change impacts.

As Jim says, there are reams of ex cathedra pronouncements from the Climate Science nomenklatura declaring that rising CO2 FORCES the TOE to rise, but the actual, empirical evidence for said forcing is pretty thin on the ground.

As for rising sea levels, 1mm/year rise corresponds to a total change in ocean volume of around 360 km^3. The change can be from an increase in the volume of the water, a decrease in the volume of the ocean basins, or some combination of both. If the rate of change is different from 1mm/year, multiply or divide 360 km^3 by the appropriate factor.

Postulating a rate of increase of 1mm/year, an increase in average ocean temperature of a few millidegrees would do the whole job. With what precision do we know the average temperature of the ocean and can we track the temperature with millidegree accuracy? Plate tectonics could easily decrease the total volume of the ocean volume by the entire amount. Can we rule out plate tectonics? Undersea eruptions of superheated water and magma occur on a massive scale. How many km^/year and with what precision is it measured? Aquifiers are pumped and drain into the ocean. How much? Rivers deposit silt. How much? Other factors affect sea level. What are they and how accurately do we know their contribution?

I don’t think that any of the above is controversial. If not, am I expected to believe that ‘Climate Science’ understands all factors contributing to sea level change, can apportion the 360km^3 rise among the factors, determine what part is ‘forced’ by anthropogenic CO2, and certify that that part represents a danger that MUST be addressed by curbing anthropogenic CO2, sooner rather than later?

To shorten what Mr. Ludwick points out, the hydrosphere is one of the 5 subsystems making up the overall climate system. All by itself, it can be described as non-linear and chaotic, coupled with the other 4 subsystems, each with their own set of complexities, add to that externalities like the sun, gravity, polarity, and cosmic rays, plus who knows how many unknown unknowns, and we can boil it all down blaming it all on man’s contribution of anywhere from 3% to 100% of the increase in Co2 from 1850 or so. Co2 is THE control knob, completely overiding all other posible variables. If we control Co2, we control the climate. And I’ve got some ocean front property in Kansas that I’ll sell you for a very reasonable price.

If skeptics want to say that an Eocene climate is good for humans, they need to make that case. I haven’t seen it yet and I wonder why. The Eocene was an iceless hothouse with sea levels about 100 meters higher and had 700-1000 ppm of CO2. Given this scenario of a slowly rising tide, Man would be evacuating coastal dwellings like New York and London at some cost, and Florida cities would become scuba destinations of a different kind. These sea levels have happened in the past and easily can again, having a high correspondence with CO2 levels. The current climate is intermediate between very low Ice Age sea levels and the 100 m higher ones of the past eras that occupy the majority of the last billion years. We are returning to those through this now fleeting phase of partial glaciation.

“…..and achieve this by denying that 700 ppm is even possibly a problem. ”

I do no such thing. I freely admit that 700 ppm is POSSIBLY a problem. I also admit that I could start today and work through next Friday listing things OTHER than anthropogenic CO2 that are POSSIBLY problems.

What I don’t admit is that there is any actual, empirical evidence, beyond reams of ex cathedra pronouncements from self-identified ‘Climate Scientists’, that atmospheric CO2 at levels less than which it actually becomes toxic actually IS a problem.

And don’t even start with the counter claim that the energy content of the deep ocean has increased by a ziggawatt over the last 50 years, all because of anthropogenic CO2, because we have measured its average temperature over that time and found that it increased by a couple of millidegrees. Climate Science as an institution couldn’t measure the annual temperature of my house with millidegree precision and it is controlled (euphemistically, I have to admit) by a thermostat.

Bob Ludwick, apart from basic physics which I know doesn’t wash with skeptics, paleoclimate is the best evidence of what 700 ppm is like. The fact that the physics explains the paleoclimate is a bonus, but either on their own should give pause as to whether we want that level of CO2.

Jim D, you write “paleoclimate is the best evidence of what 700 ppm is like”

Nonsense. Paleo data cannot tell us whether changes in temperature precede or follow changes in CO2 concentration. The time cannot be resolved with sufficient accuracy. That correlation exists seems reasonable, but the evidence strongly suggest that a rise in CO2 levels FOLLWS a rise in temperature, not the other way around.

Jim Cripwell, I think you are confused. Volcanoes caused an increase in CO2 which caused paleoclimate warming periods. This process is analogous to what we are doing now, by injecting geological carbon back into the atmosphere and surface system.

“Bob Ludwick, apart from basic physics which I know doesn’t wash with skeptics,……..”

So you maintain that starting with basic physics we (or at least those climate scientists you respect) could derive the present TOE within a few tenths of a degree (once they get around to defining it) and, having derived the TOE from basic physics, could then go back in to the ‘equation of climate’, plug in various percentages of atmospheric CO2, predict the resulting TOE AND provide a reliable estimate of the damage that would ensue, based on the postulated percentage of CO2?.

And you have enough confidence in their derivation that you would feel justified in essentially shutting down our use of fossil fuels to stave off the looming catastrophe of 700ppm in a hundred years or so?

As we used to say in the Navy when presented with some amazing new technical phenomenon or another: “Modern science knows no limitations!” Deriving present and future climate from the first principles of physics would seem to be a textbook example.

Bob L, basic physics tells us the forcing change from increasing CO2, and even Arrhenius, with crude numbers at the time and no computer, was able to calculate a surface temperature response that would be required to balance that forcing. This is the very same uncontroversial physics that explains why the surface is 33 K warmer than the top of the atmosphere effective temperature at which earth radiates to space. The magnitude of the CO2-addition change is comparable with that since the last Ice Age, so not surprisingly it raises concern.

“If skeptics want to say that an Eocene climate is good for humans, they need to make that case. I haven’t seen it yet and I wonder why. The Eocene was an iceless hothouse with sea levels about 100 meters higher and had 700-1000 ppm of CO2. ”

wiki:”The Eocene epoch, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago, is a major division of the geologic timescale ”

So the question is whether Eocene climate which can said long period of about 20 million years which had variation in climate conditions, but can described a period in which the polar caps not the permanent feature as we are familiar with in our present global climate of the last 10 million year, and this present global climate is known as an “ice box climate”.

One could say the Eocene was iceless, but it’s accurate to say it is
a hothouse. It only a “hothouse” in the sense if you were leave walk-in freezer that one could think normal room temperature as hot.
Even during the warmest periods of Eocene the average global temperature were not particularly warm compare to climate in last few hundred million years.
“Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), also called Initial Eocene Thermal Maximum (IETM), a short interval of maximum temperature lasting approximately 100,000 years during the late Paleocene and early Eocene epochs (roughly 55 million years ago). The interval was characterized by the highest global temperatures of the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to the present).”

So in this 100,000 year period which 55 million year ago it was warmer- calling such a period a hothouse would not too far from the truth, but most of Eocene was cooler, and general cooling in the direction which lead to our current ice box climate. But there reason that PETM is said to
be highest temperatures in last 65 million years- because there were warmer periods earlier than this.

So does the question regarding “Eocene climate is good for humans” refer to the small period of 100,000 in period of more 10 million year period- less than 1% of this time period. Or does refer to most of the time
time period?
In our current ice box climate, in addition the cooler condition of the interglacial period, we have had multiple periods called glacial period which lasted more than 100,000 years. Though the last several million years can be call the Ice Age. It’s common to refer to the glacier periods lasting hundred thousand years as the Ice Age period, or the last Ice Age, or this recent period as simply the Ice Age.
Anyways the many glacial periods can characterized as enormous ice caps forming in the Temperate Zone. So, North American having a ice cap that dwarfs Greenland’s ice cap. And that melting these Temperate and arctic ice caps has resulting in sea level rise in last 20,000 of over 120 meters, and during a 5000 year of this 20,000 year period, sea level rise more than 1 meter per year. Or for early modern human sea level over 1 meter per century was typical.

I suppose the question does want it argued for a comparison PETM
with recent glacial period. Or argued for comparison between most Eocene period and most of the ice box climate [mostly glacial periods].
But I imagine instead the comparison desired is the warmest period of Eocene [ PETM ] and global climate the early part of the 21 Century and foolish expectations of climate in the rest of the 21 century.
A problem with comparing *now*, with PETM is there were thought to be massive global volcanic activity during PETM. Such level volcanic activity that challenges that imagination of most humans. To compare a sudden unimaginable rise of sea level of 10 meter before the end of 21 century, is utterly insignificant to imagining such volcanic activity.
If we had this level of volcanic activity and we had Ted Turner saying with 30 years we mostly be dead and survivor would resort to cannibalism:

Ted would be considered a drunk and drug infested lunatic, but rather would be considered to giving a sober prediction.

“Bob L, basic physics tells us the forcing change from increasing CO2, and even Arrhenius, with crude numbers at the time and no computer, was able to calculate a surface temperature response that would be required to balance that forcing. ”

So Arrhenius, in the 1850’s, with his notebook, slide rule, and knowledge of basic physics was able to calculate the TOE to within a degree or so, and predict how it would vary with the percentage of atmospheric CO2?

Explain to me again what we have purchased with a few hundred billion dollars worth of Politician/Ciimate_Scientist complex and their supercomputer, satellite, ARGO, and other toys and the regulatory and taxing overhead that goes with them? An increase in precision to where we now know, admittedly with a good deal of ongoing discussion, that the CS is 2+/- 1.5 degrees? Or +/- 2.5 degrees? Or SOMETHING? But DEFINITELY requiring immediate corrective action?

gbaikie, the PETM was an extreme but short period that may have had something to do with a methane reservoir releasing GHGs. This is a worst-case scenario, so there is no focus on that part of the Eocene. Other not-so-hot parts were over 10 C warmer in the oceans than now, and were plenty warm enough to worry about, but at least they only occurred with high CO2 levels that we can avert unless we are stupid.

Bob L, the radiative transfer models are column models and don’t need a supercomputer. These are the physics models that tell us most of the global mean behavior, and can explain the current climate and the 33 degree effect, but can’t say anything about regional variations and cloud feedbacks when the climate changes. The climate models show more details of how the extra heat can be distributed over the earth’s surface by the atmosphere and ocean that for sure can’t be done with a pen and paper. They try to get at regional effects, but seem to have trouble with the magnitude of the polar warming in the Arctic and loss of sea ice. They generally also show a positive cloud feedback consistent with observations on the sign of this effect.

“So Muller is implicitly connecting the reduction in tornadoes with global climate change? How does he make that connection, and how sure is he that it isn’t just a regional natural variation that will soon oscillate back the other way?”

I think the issue is the claim that rising CO2 is causing warming AND causing more severe weather. But the evidence available
does not support premise that “global warming” causes any kind of more severe weather.
So there no evidence that global warming is causing any kind of harm- despite the drumbeat of false news reports claims of increasing severe weather, or such things as causing extinction of animals species.

If I was a skeptic I would be more inclined to say that the tornado trend is likely to be temporary and regional like a PDO, AMO or stadium wave than long-term like global warming. Muller is off-script for a skeptic.

Yes, it’s rather amusing: warmer weather could explain the reduction of severe storms due to the flattening of the equator-pole temperature gradient. Yet Warmists are hell-bent on finding MORE tornadoes etc. and mis-attributing them to warmth, rather than incursions of cold air stirring things up.

In reality, current calm weather supports their case, but they don’t know it. The coming cooling will generate worse storms, but they will think it’s because of warming. There’s no plumbing the depth of Warmist error and ignorance.

So Muller is implicitly connecting the reduction in tornadoes with global climate change? How does he make that connection

By looking at the observational record.

and how sure is he that it isn’t just a regional natural variation that will soon oscillate back the other way?

Not sure at all – nor does he make that claim.

Face it, Jim – as our planet has warmed a smidgen over the decades, tornados have decreased. But, of course, correlation does not provide evidence of causation. It does, however, provide clear evidence that global warming does not increase tornado activity, as some alarmists have tried to claim.

S one can conclude from the observational record that “climate change” (i.e. global warming) has either caused a slight reduction in tornadoes or has had no impact on tornado activity at all.

He said “strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming.” If someone had said this for a reverse case of tornadoes increasing, they would have been taken to task for even mentioning global warming in the same sentence as tornadoes, but Muller gets away with it. Criticism needs to be consistent to be respected.

Re: Scottish sceptic. I think skeptics mainly feel lonely because they haven’t persuaded anyone else they are right yet. They each beat their own path, and are not even able to get traction with their ideas even among other skeptics. It doesn’t hinder them and if no one believes what they say, that’s fine with them.

There are relatively few people in the whole wide world who are as scared of alleged CAGW as you are, jimmy d. Climate Chicken Littles are lonely little creatures crying out for attention and mitigation. They get plenty of the former and very little of the latter.

Jim D-
I never get lonely at all. If I start to get lonely and need to soothe my psyche, I just snuggle up to some more data and yet another scientific paper that discredits the warmist hysteria. Global temps are in a lull. Data for Hurricanes and Tornadoes raise questions about the narrative of extreme weather. And studies about sea level rise such as the one linked certainly begs the question about having the ocean rise to the midriff of the Statue of Liberty. Reading about how this paper finds a deceleration in sea level rise since 2004 down to a rate of 7 inches per century in spite of a rise in land-ice melt, makes for great company.
There are so many facts about the climate that have proven warmists wrong I wonder if their self confidence is waning a little. The most enduring question of the 20th Century was whether there was a conspiracy around JFK’s death. The most enduring question of the 21st Century will be when will the warmists ever get things right.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113002397

Norbert Alter, a philosopher of innovation having studied corps, explain that “innovators” have three characteristics:
– they are alien, foreigner, of other specialties, industries, culture, corps… out of here!
– they have a network of similar thinking people whu support them when they dissent (a diaspora, Judith curry blog, ICCF conferences)
– they are resilient to critics, to violence, to bullying

it seems to apply to climate skeptic, and to some “disproved but anyway working science ” scientists.

good referenc about taleb.
he hates academics, and I agree with him… except maybe the older apes who have nothing to fear, to hope, thus who work for the future, not for their publication statistics and their next semester funding.

it is a reference book in real life philosophy…
sometime i disagree with him, but I realized that reinterpreting his position, he is better than my initial idea… when we disagree (GMO) it is mostly on the situation, on what is antifragile or fragile, if risk is local or wide, not on the method.

model science is a Fragilistan, it will explode, and I’m pulling the trigger…

Nature & Science are Lehman-Brothers and Goldman-Sachs of science…
I have evidence of a huge pile of unethical behavior, tolerance to fraud, obstacle to correction, obstacle to breakthrough… what Climategate have revealed is marmalade pot stealing compared to what they have done before.

Pierre Gosselin’s summary of the von Storch interview doesn’t do him justice at all. I wish there was a complete translation of the interview. von Storch is very philosophical and balanced in his views. Gosselin does not represent that properly.
For example: “Some scientists, he says, have tended to accept dramatic scenarios and consequences even when there’s little evidence behind them.”
von Storch goes to lengths to explain that we are all part of a cultural framework. And that as part of that cultural framework we have ingrained certain views that affect our understanding and interpretation of scientific research. And that affects scientists as it affects everybody else, which makes it challenging for scientists to objectively interpret their research and makes it challenging to convey those results to the public.

The Gosselin summary is just a snapshot of the topics Gosselin found most important, but agree with you that the whole interview is much more informational.

Von Storch seems like a very humble and rational guy, who recognizes that climate hysteria has gotten out of hand. It has its origins in an apocalyptic belief system based on an age-old need to understand complex natural events and the western religious concept of guilt and retribution. It was directly caused by the actions of some scientists, rather than simply the media, which always emphasizes dramatic events in order to sell copy and cannot be blamed. He is against top-down edicts by Kaisers or scientists and believes that he, as a climate scientist, is no more qualified to discuss policy issues than any other citizen in a democratic society.

One interesting remark he made at the beginning:

After the Katrina disaster, there were those (some religious fundamentalists) who believed that Katrina resulted as a retribution for the large number of New Orleans abortion clinics.

This belief was no better or worse, according to von Storch, than the one spread by some climate alarmists that Katrina was caused by anthropogenic global warming.

“MullerMann, who lacks any training or expertise in atmospheric science complex non-linear dynamics, is more than happy to promote with great confidence the unsupportable claim that global warming will actually decrease have any noticeable impact tornado activity. His evidence for this? The false claim that the historical data demonstrate a decreasing trend in past decades should be ignored because Mann thinks so.

Most “climate scientists” don’t have a degree in climate science. It isn’t necessary in the fist place and even if one has a degree specifically in climate science, it isn’t sufficient. Mann has a degree in physics, not climate science. This throws the hypocrisy of CAGWers in a harsh light and in sharp relief.

Mann possesses a PhD in geophysics, which would qualify him as a climate scientist, and a Msc in physics, but those educational degrees have not kept some of the world’s leading physicists from finding want with his understanding of physics and math.

If you really want to study Climate and really understand it, you do not want to study Climate Science in the Climate Departments of Many Colleges. They only teach Alarmist Consensus Stuff and do not tolerate anyone who disagrees. I attended a lecture by Michael Mann and some of his former students were present. I talked to some of them afterward and they had not even heard of Maurice Ewing and William Donn and their Climate Theory. They only know Mann’s Consensus Stuff.
One Alarmist Consensus Climate Scientist who talked to our NASA Alumni Group said that none of us could make it in his basic freshman Climate Course. He was right about that. He does not allow anyone to disagree with him and we question everything. That is how we got to the Moon and Back.

If you really want to study Climate and really understand it, you do not want to study Climate Science in the Climate Departments of Many Colleges.

Given the nature of this blog I suspect Georgia Tech is an exception.
However I would not encourage any of my offspring to study climate science right now even at a place like Georgia Tech.

Unfortunately the reputation of the entire field is going down and funding in future is uncertain. Such changes harm the good along with the bad. Not a good time to be a young person starting out in the field.

I would encourage anyone to study from Dr. Judy Curry.
She is acting like a real scientist should act. She presents Many Different Theories from people she agrees with and from people she disagrees with and from people she has not decided about yet. She presents uncertainties. She is teaching people to challenge any and every thing that does not make sense and any and every thing that you think you know and may not. If you decide to learn from her and then do something other than Climate Science, you would be much better prepared for anything.
Well not anything. It would not prepare you to work with Al Gore, or Hansen or Mann, or some other Alarmist Consensus, so called, Climate Scientists I could name.
John, you are not included in this.
Andy and Barry, you are included.
You know who you are.

Actually, most coastal erosion is impacted by *mankind when structures and buildings etc. are built within reach of storm waves, especially on sandy beaches. Often seawalls have to be constructed to protect the structures and buildings. Seawalls cause storm waves to rebound, eventually stripping the beach of its sand. Turbulent seawater doesn’t allow the waves to deposit their load of sand. …. A natural sandy beach (with summer foredunes and gradual sloping backdunes, .. and without structures etc.) very slowly migrates inland, while retaining its average summer/winter profile. In some cases, petrified trees can eventually appear on the foreshore, due to the migration over very long periods.

Von Storch introduces himself and his institute correctly as one concerned with “coastal research”.

A part of this is related to “climate”, of course (wind patterns, sea currents, for example).

He is arguably just as qualified to discuss climate impacts on coastal regions as a glaciologist is to discuss climate impacts on glaciers or ice caps.

Meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, geologists, astronomers, and many other scientific disciplines are lumped together as “climate scientists” these days – it appears to be a catch-all category (that gets taxpayer funding)

RO, you might take a moment to reflect on what “climate science” actually means. How, for instance, does it differ from its predecessors, meteorology (of which HvS is a professor), “climatology”, and the numerous other ‘ologies’ that now cluster under its rubric?

“Climate Science” is a field which did not exist, as such, before CO2 catastrophism, and was minted for the sole purpose of recruiting/suborning to the CAGW cause scholarship from every possible field of enquiry, from toad-counting to economics. It offered enticing rewards to scientific mediocrities in the form of publication and research funding which their modest talents would never have obtained them in normal circumstances, and that mutual esteem which explains so much of the appeal of warmism to “progressive” thinkers.

With its promise of a short-cut to stardom, it’s no wonder so many mediocrities (Mann merely primus inter pares) rallied to the standard of “climate science”.

Accepted that Michael Man is exactly where the wacko alarmist wing of climate science is at, it must be a given that those who cannot admit the ‘hockey stick’ and the UN-IPCC are frauds are among the wackos.

Lol
On the hockey-stick von Storch says:
This was a remarkable scientific research effort. But it was too quickly touted as the last word. They did that to make sure every idiot understands what the problem is – even idiots who live in some white houses …

Ahhh, Mann invokes the requisite shot at the Koch Brothers to appeal to the bobblehead economic and scientific illiterates at Huffington Post. What would an article be by the left over at HP without besmirching the devil reincarnate Koch Brothers. That kind of diatribe plays well over there, but to the adults in the world, it is a non-starter. Does Mann ever do any authentic science or is his partisanship so intense that he has lost all his cognitive skills?

[T]he 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.

The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms – mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP , and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.

Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom and Norway’s Statoil.

Nine were government run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Poland, the host of this week’s talks.

Dr. Muller first denied that CO2 was the cause of global warming, then decided that it is and espoused nuclear power as the answer. Now he is in favor of natural gas. Natural gas is good for our energy independence and balance of payments but does nothing to reduce global warming. It produces half the CO2 for a given amount of heat, but it is the heat, not the CO2, that is the cause of global warming. If the scientists who were studying the cause of global warming were not so myopic as to expect beforehand, that CO2 was the cause, they could have calculated that the heat of combustion alone was more than enough to explain the rise in atmospheric temperature. Total heat emissions from our energy use( including nuclear power) was four times the amount accounted for by the actual measured rise in atmospheric temperature. The whole effort to establish a “climate sensitivity” to CO2 is a farce that has resulted in models that totally ignore the impact of heat emissions, and has led to ridiculous proposals for CCS. Removal of one ppm CO2 would require capture and sequester of 18,000,000,000,000 pounds of CO2. What is the cost? What is the benefit? We need to be realistic and accept the notion that fossil and nuclear must be replaced with “renewable” sources, unless you live in colder areas above sea level.

“Mann loses this argument. The undercounting of tornadoes is a problem prior to 1990 (worse undercounting as you go back in time); hence a decrease in recent hurricanes relative to historical values cannot be attributed to undercounting.”

Someone is confusing tornadoes and hurricanes

You go to the articles cited and you see that Mann is clearly arguing that it is too early to tell whether the number of tornadoes is increasing or not (uncertainnty monster anyone?) and Jeff from weather underground says the same thing.

Clearly though, damages are increasing. More buildings or more tornadoes?

And with weather related disasters increasing faster than geophysical ones, as Jeff Masters points out, so best advice is take a shot of your favorite beverage before you open your insurance bill.

Just because Munich Re is betting that climate change is influencing the rate of natural disasters doesn’t mean they are right, they are biased and they don’t want to lose that bet.

It’s probably a typo but in fact undercounting in the past applies to both hurricanes and tornados so your first point is pointless.

Normalized economic damage for tornados from 1950-2011 peaked during the 1960-1970 timeframe so your point that economic damage has risen is wrong. See below. It’s problematic to say either way because one lucky hit on a big city by a big tornado dramatically skews the record such as the billion dollars in damage caused by a single tornado that happened to hit Oklahoma city in 1999. Undoubtedly there’s more dollars (inflation adjusted) paid out by insurance companies for tornado damage as time goes on but there’s also more people paying for the insurance so the risk per person isn’t necessarily the same and in fact, as shown below, the normalized risk now is less than it was 40-50 years ago.

It’s the same in the case of hurricanes. More total damage but also more total insured so risk per capita is essentially unchanged. Hurricanes are more sketchy than tornados to say anything conclusive because there are too few hurricanes that make landfall each year and so one lucky eye-wall that hits a large vulnerable below-sea level city like New Orleans & Katrina in 2005 skews the data for a decade.

And just a note for Michael Mann who is lying or ignorant of tornado conditions vis climate change…

Tornados break out when cold dry Arctic air collides with warm moist tropical air. This happens a lot over so-called tornado alley in the United States. Here’s the clinker in Mann’s dumb assertion about one factor (warmer air) being more conducive to tornados. It’s not the warmth of the air its the difference in enthalpy between the Arctic air mass and the tropical air mass that gives power to the storm systems. Engineers know this instinctively. Convective cells are heat engines and heat engines convert energy to work through temperature differentials. Everyone, including Michael Mann, should know by now that so-called AGW delivers more warming to the Arctic than to the tropics. Therefore global warming reduces the temperature differential between tropical and Arctic air masses and hence reduces the potential work that can be performed across the gradient.

I have made that point about temperature differentials between arctic and tropics many times, although you express it better than I do.

it is of course the very reason why the worst storms and most severe weather occurred during the LIA as I have pointed out here a number of times.

We are currently living in relatively benign climatic times and therefore, as would be expected, our current weather events are similarly not as great as during the astonishing weather we can trace through the hundreds of years during which we have observational records.

In My Opinion, Climate Change likely does influence natural disasters.
It is not known what the influence actually is.
There is still no evidence that Climate Change, Specifically Warming, is caused by manmade CO2.
It is extremely unlikely that any changes in climate caused by a manmade fraction of a trace gas can be measured or understood.

A primary objective of the NASA Earth-Sun Exploration Technology Office is to understand the observed Earth climate variability, thus enabling the determination and prediction of the climate’s response to both natural and human-induced forcing. … We also demonstrate how mutual information and transfer entropy can be applied so as to allow researchers not only to identify relations among climate variables, but also to characterize and quantify their possible causal interactions.

This paper examines complex oscillatory behavior in climate data through the lens of mixed-mode oscillations. As a case study, a conceptual climate model with governing equations for global mean temperature, atmospheric carbon, and oceanic carbon is analyzed. … Geometric singular perturbation theory is used to demonstrate the existence of a folded node singularity. … It is the first conceptual climate model demonstrated to have the capability to produce an MMO pattern.

The climate is an excellent example of a forced, dissipative system dominated by nonlinear processes and featuring non-trivial dynamics of a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. The understanding of the climate’s structural and multiscale properties is crucial for the provision of a unifying picture of its dynamics and for the implementation of accurate and efficient numerical models. … Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics allows for framing in a unified way problems as different as climate response to forcings of general nature, the effect of altering the boundary conditions or the coupling between geophysical flows, and the derivation of parametrizations for numerical models.

Thank you Judith Curry/Climate Etc, for ably entertaining an audience of non-numerate skeptics with anecdotal tales of innuendo, scandal, and umbrage!

Needless to say, gossipy interviews are irrelevant to the continued improvement of (what Judith Curry calls) “the best available climate-change science”.

Conclusion The best available climate-change science, based upon the best available mathematical and physical understanding, as verified and validated by the largest available datasets, continues to affirm that:

• James Hansen’s 1981 thermodynamical climate-change worldview is broadly correct, and that

a fan of *MORE* discourse: James Hansen’s 1981 thermodynamical climate-change worldview is broadly correct, and that

“broadly correct”? I suppose that’s improvement over your previous claims that his predictions have actually been accurate. How broadly? Hardly anyone denies outright that the laws of thermodynamics are appropriate; the argument is over the detailed energy flows in a high dimensional non-linear dissipative system with non-constant input everywhere.

“I think by now that everyone who follows your links and reads them knows that you are bluffing.”

Marler is against the presentation of ideas. How else can one interpret his assertion given that the last paper linked is called “Mathematical and Physical Ideas for Climate Science”.

”
… this has lead the scientific community to refocus on the importance of a thermodynamical approach — as complementary to the dynamical one — for studying classes of problems like those relevant for nonlinear geophysical flows.
”

WebHubTelescope: Marler is against the presentation of ideas. How else can one interpret his assertion given that the last paper linked is called “Mathematical and Physical Ideas for Climate Science”.

I have never objected to the presentation of ideas, and I have on multiple occasions referred to the “dynamical systems in climate” books by Henk Dijkstra. However, the paper by Lucarini et al, unlike the books by Dijkstra, has not a single showing that any method in the book is relevant to any climate measurements. The paper does cite other papers that may have such demonstrations. So I expect the paper is worthwhile.

For the dynamics, rather than equilibria, of thermodynamics I have referred to the last chapters of the textbook by Kondepudi and Prigogine.

Do you sustain FOMD’s claim, presented after his links to the papers, that the climate is simple? Clearly, if those papers are relevant, then the climate is not simple or simple to understand. That’s why I wrote that FOMD was “bluffing”.

For the study of climate, given the measurements to date, do you think that “mutual information” and “entropy transfer” are really improvements on correlation and non-linear least squares estimation? Or even improvements on simple plotting for the intended purpose?

WebHubTelescope, from your link: The CSALT model of the global temperature anomaly has no right to work as well as it does.

Of course it does. It is a recent result of a history of modeling and remodeling the same data over a period of many years. It follows Vaughan Pratt’s model and it follows your own model with a time^3 predictor for temp in the multiple linear regression; and it follows the endless series of other modeling by N. Scafetta. Like the others, it has not yet been tested against out of sample data. Incidentally, it has the feature that dT/dt is independent of CO2 when CO2 is constant.

WebHubTelescope: Quoting me. “Incidentally, it has the feature that dT/dt is independent of CO2 when CO2 is constant.”

Marler is lying.

It is no lie whatsoever. In WebHub’s model, current mean Earth temperature is linear in current lnCO2, with a constant of proportionality, a, estimated by linear least squares.. It is easy to show that

dT/dt = (a/CO2)(dCO2/dt), which is 0 when dCO2/dt is 0, if WebHub’s model is accurate enough to support drawing any inferences from it.

@WHT: [Pratt] constructs waveforms as fitting parameters, such as sawtooth. I only use data in the model with no artificial waveforms. … The CSALT model does not use a time^3 predictor but uses the historical estimates of CO2 that is available online.

What is an “artificial waveform”? Do you mean that your modeling employs no waveforms at all, or that you have drawn a line in the sand between artificial and natural waveforms?

If the latter, I would protest that you’re being a tad arbitrary there. What makes a sawtooth more artificial than a log or a sine?

If the former, then what makes all these modeling approaches worthwhile is the main conclusions that can be drawn from them. One can then reasonably ask (a) whether parameter-driven models lead to different conclusions from data-driven ones, and (b) how important those differences are.

One difference is that parameter-driven models can be used both to hindcast (for example as a sanity check, an excellent reason to drop your former cubic waveform) and forecast. But if neither of those are important and the main goal is instead insight into aspects of recent climate, then data-driven models have the apparent advantage of less arbitrariness: no dependence on choice of functions such as sawtooth, exponentials, etc.

However there still remains considerable arbitrariness in how the data is massaged to produce conclusions. When it comes to laying your code on the table to show just how much massaging separates your conclusions from the data, there is a big difference between five lines of code and a hundred.

This points up another advantage of parameter-based models: they succinctly express the arbitrary choices that have been made. In order to compete, a data-driven model needs to limit itself to code that is just as succinct as the formulas in the parameter-driven models, or this claimed benefit of a formula-free model, no arbitrariness, is lost.

Yet another advantage of parameter-based models is that they are falsifiable. Various tests, not least the test of time, can weed out those that turned out to lack predictive skill. How do you falsify a data-driven model if all it does is summarize the recent past?

That said, a clear summary can still be valuable if for example it can convincingly explain aspects of recent climate. I’m on Web’s side there, assuming I’ve understood the distinction he’s drawn here.

As long as the transient of the forcing is as strong as it is, the transient of the response is not that critical in generating the initial TCR value. Your problem is that you probably haven’t gotten your hands dirty looking at how impulse response functions work.

Certainly if the CO2 was miraculously turned off tomorrow, the temperature would continue to creep up, but as long as the CO2 is accumulating the way it is, the error in not taking that into account is not that great.

Look at C&M’s paper. I suppose it is no good because one of the authors (Myrhvold) is not a climate scientist, LOL.

WebHubTelescope:Marler is lying. The CSALT model does not use a time^3 predictor but uses the historical estimates of CO2 that is available online.

There is no lie. Before
WebHub developed his CSALT model, he reported to us a model that had b*time^p where b an p were both estimated by nonlinear least-squares. After being prompted to consider whether that model made a reasonable forecast for the future, he developed the lnCO2 model.

I have been wondering: in what units is CO2 represented in this model? If that is described on the web pages, I have missed it. Usually we read of CO2 in parts per million.

WebHubTelescope: As long as the transient of the forcing is as strong as it is, the transient of the response is not that critical in generating the initial TCR value. Your problem is that you probably haven’t gotten your hands dirty looking at how impulse response functions work.

Certainly if the CO2 was miraculously turned off tomorrow, the temperature would continue to creep up, but as long as the CO2 is accumulating the way it is, the error in not taking that into account is not that great.

Look at C&M’s paper. I suppose it is no good because one of the authors (Myrhvold) is not a climate scientist, LOL.

I read C&M’s paper. My claim is that your model. has the rate of change of temp not a function of CO2 once CO2 concentration stabilizes. If the truth about the climate is otherwise, then your model needs improvement (at best) or is too inaccurate for planning purposes.

WebHubTelescope: Marler is lying. It uses data from as far back as 1880. The model fit can take data up to 1960, and then project to current dates very effectively.

There is no “lie”. WebHub already knew from Vaughan Pratt’s model that the lnCO2 model fit the data well up through recent years. That only a (large) subset of the data was used in parameter estimation is not that important a fact when fitting a partially new model to data that have already been frequently modeled. Other parts of the lnCO2 model were already known to be accurate up to recent years from you analysis of your time^3 model.

“I read C&M’s paper. My claim is that your model. has the rate of change of temp not a function of CO2 once CO2 concentration stabilizes. If the truth about the climate is otherwise, then your model needs improvement (at best) or is too inaccurate for planning purposes.”

Empty assertion with no basis behind it. Do a convolution of a diffusional impulse response with an accelerating function. Link to it here (I bet he won’t do it, as Marler has never lifted a finger, AFAICR. He will simply assert the same thing)

I said before that the CSALT model is giving us the TCR of CO2. The TCR will approach the larger ECS when the tails of the impulse response are included.

Marler can go ahead and experiment with the CSALT interface. Start creeping up the CO2 lag and you will see the TCR start to increase. This is pushing more of the response in the tails. But I don’t do this because the correct response is diffusional and not first-order lag, which means that there is an initial TCR response and a longer tail.

Actually there is no point in me doing this because the fit works perfectly well as is. All somebody has to do is plug in the CSALT parameters with coefficients and you will get the temperature anomaly to within 0.05C standard deviation. Can’t do this if one has to do a diffusional convolution in your head.

The real issue is that Marler does not produce any artifacts to support any of his claims.

“There is no “lie”. WebHub already knew from Vaughan Pratt’s model that the lnCO2 model fit the data well up through recent years. That only a (large) subset of the data was used in parameter estimation is not that important a fact when fitting a partially new model to data that have already been frequently modeled. Other parts of the lnCO2 model were already known to be accurate up to recent years from you analysis of your time^3 model.”

Vaughan Pratt’s work is perfectly valid given his premises. I will mention it because it gives a reference frame in which to compare against, and many people know about it because it appeared as a top-level post here.

The ln(CO2) dependence has been known for years.

More of the inspiration came from Foster&Rahmstorf, Kosaka & Xie, and Kevin Cowtan who started adding the ENSO-related parameters to explain the pause. The CSALT model is a pause-buster and is valuable for finding the TCR attribution of CO2.

Whatever else you are saying is garbled, likely because you are becoming flustered as your logic is completely screwed up.

@WHT: Between Vaughan Pratt’s use of a parameter-based model and my use of a data-driven model, the TCR is at least 2C for doubling of CO2.

Since your model is a year more up to date than mine I’d stick to your current conclusions and not rely on my year-old ones, which are by no means cast in stone.

As can be seen from Figure 10 of my poster here last December, when the sawtooth model, labeled SAW there, is fitted to HadCRUT3, the resulting phase and period makes it close to zero for 1990-2010 regardless of the amplitude of the fit. It therefore automatically credits 100% of the recent temperature rise to the exponentially growing component, labeled AGW there, which multiple regression cannot prevent.

Conclusion: SAW unfairly biases the fit during 1990-2010 in favor of AGW. While I don’t recall anyone raising that specific objection at the time (if they did it seems to have been drowned in the flood of more tangential objections), in hindsight it seems like a strong argument against using SAW to model AMO. John S. raised a related concern about orthogonality but did not point out that SAW was near zero for 1990-2010.

The multidecadal (> 20 year) component of global land-sea temperature indices since 1850 (HadCRUT4 for now—Mosher, when can we expect BEST sea?) separates naturally into two components of respectively oscillatory and exponential growth. Although I used a parameter-based approach at the time, it looks like both you and I now favor data-driven modeling. My SAW model had the above-mentioned bias for 1990-2010, while your cubic model had an obvious bias in the past that makes it hindcast absurdly, calling into question its forecasting ability.

Since it seems difficult to find any formula that doesn’t embed some sort of bias somewhere, it is understandable that one would turn to data-driven models—you’ll find that my more recent analyses of HadCRUT are along similar lines.

However as I pointed out yesterday, this replaces the biases implicit in choice of formula by biases implicit in data-massaging methodology.

Out of the frying pan into the fire!

If formula-based approaches seem more prone to bias than data-driven approaches, it might merely be because formulas are more transparent than software and therefore their biases are more evident. Software obfuscates bias, fooling some into believing a data-driven approach is less biased while leaving others with the suspicion that biases are being hidden.

Only when software can be made as transparent as formulas can a fair evaluation of their respective biases be made.

Returning to the matter of separating multidecadal HadCRUT as a sum of oscillatory and exponential components, my current estimates are that the latter correlates remarkably well with both CDIAC emissions data and the Keeling curve under the assumptions of the Arrhenius logarithmic law, 280 ppmv pre-1850, 44% retention by the atmosphere of our emitted CO2, and an observed climate sensitivity (assumed constant) of 1.8 °C per doubling of CO2. YMMV.

Correlation is not causation.

On the one hand we have strong grounds to expect rising CO2 to raise the temperature, and moreover logarithmically (though I would argue that the extant line-by-line derivations of this law from the HITRAN data still need considerable work to meet physics’ standards of rigor).

On the other hand, the rise in CO2 since 1850 would appear to be occasioned by the product of population growth with per capita fuel consumption. The other temperature impacts of that product (both positive and negative) can be expected to be similarly correlated, making it essentially impossible to separate those impacts based solely on observed global land-sea temperature.

If one further assumes nonzero Hansen ocean delay (in the sense of my AGU FM 2012 poster) one can infer (as opposed to observe) a higher long-term climate sensitivity (yet another notion that I would distinguish from both ECS and TCR). For example I currently estimate that a delay of 10 years would entail a long-term climate sensitivity of of 2.1 °C/dbl, and 20 years 2.6 &geg;C/dbl.

This is somewhat lower than the numbers in my 2012 poster. I attribute the difference to the above-mentioned defect of SAW. A data-driven approach frees up the oscillatory component to do something different. The trick there however is not to end up merely replacing one bias with another, which is difficult to judge based on opaque software.

The feature of Vaughan’s model that I had forgotten about was his incorporation of the Hansen ocean delay. This is the point that Marler is being insistent about.
I have found that if this delay is increased the sensitivity of the ln(co2) increases if it is based on fitting to the data.

from the intro to Knuth et al: The basic
idea is that changes in one climate subsystem will cause or force responses in other subsystems. These responses in turn feed back to force other subsystems, and so on. While it is commonly assumed that these interactions can be described by linear systems techniques, one must appeal to large-scale averages, asymptotic distributions and central limit theorems to defend such models. In doing so, our ability to describe processes with reasonably high spatiotemporal resolution is lost in the averaging step. There are distinct advantages to developing feedback and forcing models that allow for nonlinearity.

From there it gets complicated: mutual information, transfer entropy and such. Possibly worthy some day, but hardly simple.

I like the paper well enough, but I doubt that “equilibrium statistical mechanics” has that much to offer the climate dialogue except possibly increased attention to random variation. They do not have, indeed none of the papers has, any direct comparison of observable/measurable climate variables and models.

Which paper did you like best, why, and what exactly is its implication for the study of the effects of CO2 on the future of near Earth surface climate? I missed any such implication on first reading.

”
I like the paper well enough, but I doubt that “equilibrium statistical mechanics” has that much to offer the climate dialogue except possibly increased attention to random variation. They do not have, indeed none of the papers has, any direct comparison of observable/measurable climate variables and models.
”

Why the attitude? Why do you think that you are the final arbiter in what approach to physics that we can apply to solving these problems?

Buried in the energy balance formulation as well is the Stadium Wave component which is a large scale synodic internal energy term.

One can make many first-order approximations on the road to understanding how the pieces fit together. That is the significance of the CSALT model and the direction that much of state-of-the-art climate science is heading.

WebHubTelescope: In fact the CSALT model uses the ideas of free energy thermodynamics [1] to model the influences of constitutive variables to the climate

from your web page: That is essentially what goes into the R linear model solver, where we use the data from a temperature time-series such as GISS for dT and appropriate data sets for the other factors:

lm( dT ~ C + S + A + L + T )

and then out pop the coefficients, c1 … c5

The reconstructed function is created from these coefficients applied to the individual data sets.

Any relationship between that and “variational principles in thermodynamics” is associational. With a constant energy input to the climate you can not even be certain that every change produces an increase in entropy.

In fact you use least squares multiple linear regression to relate a predictand to a bunch of predictors. Before switching to lnCO2 (pevioualy shown by Vaughan Pratt to be a good regressor for temp) you were happy with time^3 until I questioned whether you really wanted a cubic term in time.

Why do you think that you are the final arbiter in what approach to physics that we can apply to solving these problems?

Marler is really at the end of his rope, trying to take credit for getting me to switching from a polynomial to a ln(CO2) model for the CO2 forcing. In fact, I was only using the polynomial for the Eureqa formula solver to see what it would find as the best heuristic.

Then hes says “With a constant energy input to the climate you can not even be certain that every change produces an increase in entropy.”.
Entropy is mainly heat capacity and the CSALT model is capturing this in the fit procedure. This gets most of the way to finding attribution of ln(C2).

That is why you are lashing out in anger so much — you really do hate to see progress being made.

WHT, just reading through this thread between you and Marler I don’t see any anger in his responses, but I do detect a bit of defensive posturing by you. Is it possible you are mis interpreting Marlers feelings during this exchange, and if not how are you so certain?

“Marler is against the presentation of ideas. How else can one interpret his assertion given that the last paper linked is called “Mathematical and Physical Ideas for Climate Science”.”

“Marler is lying.” x 5 times

“Why the attitude? Why do you think that you are the final arbiter in what approach to physics that we can apply to solving these problems?”

“Marler is really at the end of his rope, trying to take credit for getting me to switching from a polynomial to a ln(CO2) model for the CO2 forcing”

These are your words…. These are not the kind of words one uses when defending a thesis. If I had spoken to my doctoral committee using this type of language I probably would have failed. Use your intellect to defend why your model works, but cut the Mannian attitude. It doesn’t help you sell your case, makes you look like an ass and puts people off. People don’t gravitate to the ideas of pompous know-it-alls, even if they might be more right than wrong.

“if your opponent successfully addresses some point, then say he must also address some further point. If you can make these points more and more difficult (or diverse) then eventually your opponent must fail. If nothing else, you will eventually find a subject that your opponent isn’t up on. “

You are right that I would treat a committee with some respect, but not these clowns.

WebHubTelescope: Marler is talented at fallacious reasoning. Right now he is attempting to use the argument of “Moving the Goalposts”

What I wrote about your model is true, though the “follow” comment was ambiguous and one of it’s meanings I did not intend.. The csalt model is still “live”, and the test of the model will come with future data, as I repeat about all the “live” models.

WebHubTelescope: Marler is really at the end of his rope, trying to take credit for getting me to switching from a polynomial to a ln(CO2) model for the CO2 forcing. In fact, I was only using the polynomial for the Eureqa formula solver to see what it would find as the best heuristic.

I think I merely recounted the chronology. The main point was not that you responded to me personally, but that your lnCO2 model came after much modeling of the data by you and by others. When you first presented the model with b*time^p you did not mention the least-squares estimate of p in your blog post, as though you were unaware that the particular estimate of p, appx 3, had a dubious consequence.

I think your claim that I move the goal posts is incorrect: the goal posts are the same, namely that any model has to be demonstrated to be sufficiently accurate on future data before being taken as a basis for future planning; and all the consequences of any model should be explored. When Vaughan Pratt wrote his model I commented that it would acquire credibility if a physical bases for the complicated “noise” estimates in his model could be identified; your csalt model is an improvement in that respect.

A primary objective of the NASA Earth-Sun Exploration Technology Office is to understand the observed Earth climate variability, thus enabling the determination and prediction of the climate’s response to both natural and human-induced forcing. … We also demonstrate how mutual information and transfer entropy can be applied so as to allow researchers not only to identify relations among climate variables, but also to characterize and quantify their possible causal interactions.

Matthew R Marler claims [wrongly] “None of the papers has any direct comparison of observable/measurable climate variables and models.”

Like others I don’t get what you are talking about. At it’s heart the Knuth paper seems to be about methodologies rather than conclusions. In fact it’s jumping off point seems to be the present failure of climate science to get to grips with the basics.

“In Earth Science,the fact that the majority of our eﬀorts are spent on amassing large amounts of data indicates that we have not yet identiﬁed the relevant variables for many of the problems that we study.”

It’s pointing climate scientists at new ways of looking at their data. If anything it seems to be a prime example of why something like the 97% consensus is an irrelevance. I don’t see how it shedding any light on anything that could be linked directly to the bigger (policy) questions ATM. You’ll have to be more clear how does this paper make JC discussing climate science on this blog an irrelevance?

The papers are interesting, but they present nothing new in climate science. Mutual information is a great idea, but when the key relationships are monotonic, and the random variations have normal distributions, then mutual information is little improvement over correlations. The use of mutual information certainly does not justify fomd’s claim that understanding climate change is “simple”.

Moral codes
Mark Steyn reviews how moral codes and restraint are essential for civilization in contrast to the descent into thuggery as climate alarmists are demonstrating as you cite above. See Knockouts High and Low
Michael Mann has obviously left civilized behavior and the scientific method, and is descending to “nature, red in tooth and claw”.

WUWT have this week followed Monckton down the Salby rabbit hole. Salbyites are on a scientific par with the dragonslayers, and they’re just constructing the latest ABCD meme for their denizens’ consumption and our entertainment.

Edim, if you mean denial of spontaneous unexplainable climate change, yes. It is easy to deny that something is unexplainable when you already have a quantitative explanation. Look at other science, for example: evolution, gravity, relativity. They have quantitative explanations for what is happening. You are saying something equivalent to, just because Newton’s Laws work it doesn’t mean that they are not provably wrong, and something else explains it just as well.

I think it is as Lubos said, like Brownian motion. Regional variations may be “random,” whatever that means in a physical system whose behavior is determined by physical laws, but it still doesn’t necessarily cancel out.

If anything, CO2 alone explains more than the effect we have seen, so we have to look for negative factors like aerosols or volcanoes to bring it back down. Yes, CO2 isn’t the complete explanation, aerosols and other GHGs are needed too.

JimD, “If anything, CO2 alone explains more than the effect we have seen, so we have to look for negative factors like aerosols or volcanoes to bring it back down. Yes, CO2 isn’t the complete explanation, aerosols and other GHGs are needed too.”

No, CO2 has a strong correlation with temperature and all activities of mankind. For CO2 to “explain” things then all of the impacts of CO2 would be obvious, the models would be dead nuts on and there would not be a debate. The facts are that the models are drifting further from reality, DTR has swapped sign, the evidence of water vapor and cloud amplification is missing, natural variability is playing a stronger role, energy balance models are showing less and less sensitivity to atmospheric forcings of any kind and there is still +/- 17 Wm-2 of uncertainty in the ocean energy imbalance.

The skeptics always ignore aerosols as a factor because it doesn’t help their cause. They need to explain a lot of warming as it is even without adding that some of it is hidden by the aerosol growth since the beginning of the century, and especially since the 1940’s. Without aerosols we might have seen 0.4 C more warming already.

JimD, “The skeptics always ignore aerosols as a factor because it doesn’t help their cause. ”

I don’t know of any skeptics that ignore aerosols. Aerosols and aerosol indirect effects are a major uncertainty that Troy Masters has attempted to tackle recently in the journal of climate dynamics. Clouds themselves are basically aerosols where the droplet diameter has a huge impact on the wide range of effects with the added bonus of phase changes to boot.

Thanks to that huge electromagentic spectrum, some have even said in the past that near the surface, the radiant spectrum is virtually saturated. They have pointed out the unexpected impact of mixed phase clouds, the ENSO/cloud relationship and the impact of shifting southern hemisphere westerlies.

I don’t know of a single skeptic that is against improved and expanded particle arrestors applications to reduce human contributions to aerosols. The fact of the matter though is there will always be aerosols and their impact is not easy to predict.

The difference between total and clear-sky trends is due to cloud. Though Figure 1 shows data from 1954, there are few stations in the NZ climate network with pyranometer data from before 1970. An alternative and independent measure of the change in cloud can be found in the record of sunshine hours at 207 sites around NZ and the South Pacific

What these developments tell me is that there are some important cracks in the Team’s “communication” facade. All irony aside, seeing Mann descending to this level is sad. I wonder if anyone else at Real Climate will distance themselves from this kind of thing.

In a related development, Climate Audit has exposed that in private some team members agree with many of McIntyre’s critiques of Mann.

Compared to pretty much every other climate scientist, Mann comes across as a publicity-seeking hothead. This doesn’t mean he is always wrong, however, and he was right to call Muller out on his unproven assertion about climate change affecting tornadoes.

Not really. He was pointing out a simple inconvenient fact: “….a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.”
But the evidence shows the opposite.

He does vaguely put forward a ‘possibility’, and ends with a factual statement:

But global warming does not obviously lead to increased or more violent tornadoes. It is possible, for instance, that the increased energy brought by the higher temperatures of global warming is less significant than global warming’s reduction in the north-south temperature difference (the poles warm more than the Equator). The latter could reduce the kind of hot-cold weather fronts that generate severe storms.

The current climate models are simply unable to make a clear prediction, and reduced tornadoes from global warming are just as plausible as increased ones.

One thing is clear, however: The number of severe tornadoes has gone down.

Muller can’t extrapolate from this. We have only had 10-20% of the eventual climate change. So far, it is a regional oscillation like PDOs and such, nothing more. Implying that a 20% reduction is part of a persisting climate trend gives people a false hope, just as with the lull in Atlantic landfalling hurricanes and “the pause”. Nothing good comes from false hope in the long run, even if it is politically expedient for certain factions in the short term.

You seem to be hunting for an explication of the text that allows you to say something critical.

This is all that is clear

“One thing is clear, however: The number of severe tornadoes has gone down. That is not a scientific hypothesis, but a scientific conclusion based on observation. Regardless of the limitations of climate theory, we can take some comfort in that fact.”

Let’s start at the begining

“Yes, you read that correctly. Despite the recent spate of deadly twisters, including those that tore through the Midwest over the weekend, the scientific evidence shows that strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming.”

The data do in fact show this. Second, it is either possible that the explanation lies in AGW or it is impossible, or it is unknowable.

Muller argues that it is possible. yes, possible. that is all. Its a very circumspect claim that is entirely supported by the evidence.

We observe that they have decreased while temperature has increased. We conclude that it is possible, merely POSSIBLE, that the two are connected. We see no evidence that they could NOT be connected.
Turning to models, we see they are of no help. So its possible. Not impossible. Not ruled out, not unlikely, Not likely, not very likely, not most likely, merely possible.

Read without your bias its a rather unremarkable trivial claim. But you apparently feel the need to push the text in a direction that it doesnt want to go. That’s fine, just not very convincing to people who dont share your bias.

love this “it is either possible that the explanation lies in AGW or it is impossible, or it is unknowable.
Muller argues that it is possible. yes, possible. that is all. Its a very circumspect claim that is entirely supported by the evidence.”

So, if we observe that global temperatures have decreased while temperature has increased. We conclude that it is possible, merely POSSIBLE, that the two are connected. We see no evidence that they could NOT be connected.
Caution! Only to be used if global warming [measured actual data] goes down while models sorry, Way [a lovely chap, sharp mind, salt of the earth, excellent scientist and never inhaled at SKS] and Cowman, go up.

So we’ve got one factor that is a toss-up, and another one that appears favorable for tornado activity. The combination of them is therefore slightly on the “favorable” side, and if you’re a betting person, that’s probably what you would go with. ”

Here is mann’s argument

1. Warm moist air is favorable for tornados, and theory tells us we will have more warm moist air.
2. Tornados also depend on wind shear and its unclear.

Therefore, a betting man will bet on more tornado’s

However

A) During the last 60 years, we;ve had warmer moister air, and tornados
have declined.

So, dial the clock back to 1954. use Mann’s logic and bet on more tornados. You’ll lose that bet which means you should be adjusting your belief in #1 or #2.

mann starts from theory ignores the observations and uses uncertainty to argue for precaution. Muller starts with data, and suggests that theory should explain the data.

And lets NOt ignore manns conspiratorial ideation. Remember the climategate mails. There too he thought something was rotten at the NYT

Can’t get this in the right place, JimD, but I agree of course that Mann may be in some or even many points right. He is also wrong in some very important ones and the refusal of the climate establishment to admit any of it is disturbing. As McIntyre showed earlier this week, in private they say it. This is I think a problem of honesty and directness and does impact how the informed public perceives the field, with well earned distrust.

The level of rhetoric that Mann uses is approaching Rommian levels and for principled scientists should cause them to distance themselves. Those who don’t will get some of his fleas.

Yes inflated egos and injured pride at their very best.
At some level I understand Mann, though. Mueller never came out to say: Yes you were right and I was wrong. His pride probably doesn’t allow him to do that.
And Mann of course with all the crap that has been thrown at him may be a bit too sensitive …

Agree with you that Muller made a giant boo-boo, when he allowed the BEST report conclusion to stand that the urban heat island effect had resulted in a net spurious reduction in the recorded land surface warming, rather than a spurious increase, as many local and regional studies had shown.

This was so absurd that it raised doubts about the whole report.

His second boo-boo was to add in that the warming was largely anthropogenic in origin, when the BEST study had neither looked for nor found any evidence to support such a claim.

So those were two areas where “Muller was wrong”.

But these points have nothing to do with his difference of opinion with Mann on the root cause of the reduced level of tornado activity.

This argument has always been about whether a system with more energy in it will provoke more violent storms, or one in which the polar/equator gradient lessens with warming, thus provoking fewer violent storms.

We don’t know the answer, but the processes work in opposite directions, theoretically.
==========

“Agree with you that Muller made a giant boo-boo, when he allowed the BEST report conclusion to stand that the urban heat island effect had resulted in a net spurious reduction in the recorded land surface warming, rather than a spurious increase, as many local and regional studies had shown.”

Sadly that is not what we claimed.

Looking at all trends you see that the noise in trend is quite high.
Given that the noise in trend is quite high it was not possible to find
a statistically significant positive bias. The bias we found ranged from positive to negative. Truth be told there are cities that have
negative UHI. This doesnt get reported because there is MONEY in finding positive UHI bias. Negative UHI bias happens when

1. The surrounding rural area has barren land class and the city
plants trees.
2. The city sucks water resources from the surrounding rural.

Another good test is to look at Marine air temperature trends over the 1979-2013 time period. Guess what?

The bottom line is this. No one has come up with a definition of urban or rural that will allow you to find a positive bias. I’ve looked at thousands of cases, thousands of sensitivity tests on the definitions. FIndings?
Nothing. For example, a definition that gets you positive bias in the US will get you a negative bias in india and south america.

Looking at all trends you see that the noise in trend is quite high. Given that the noise in trend is quite high it was not possible to find a statistically significant positive bias.

You can’t be serious about it. For the period 1979-2012 rate of surface warming over land, as measured by meteorological stations is 0.27 K/decade. During this period Temperature of Lower Troposphere over land, as measured by satellites has increased at a rate of 0.17 K/decade. At the same time atmospheric moisture must have increased, because there is more evaporation in a warming world (sea surface temperature has increased at a rate of 0.11 K/decade), so average lapse rate could not possibly increase.

Therefore there is at least a 0.1 K/decade warming bias in land surface temperature data as measured by surface stations globally. We can even calculate how it depends on log population density, because in this interval world population has increased at a rate of 0.22 doubling/decade, which means a lower estimate of local warming in the vicinity of surface stations due to increasing population density is 0.45 K/doubling. That’s the so called Urban Heat Island effect, a misnomer, because it also happens in quite rural areas, in a fractal like manner, mimicking spatial population distribution. Unfortunately locations of surface stations are not randomly distributed relative to this fractal, they should be close to human habitation and/or site of vigorous economic activity, otherwise maintenance costs would skyrocket.

As world population has doubled almost twice in the 20th century, we can conclude a substantial part of observed warming over land was due to UHI. Whoever fails to compensate for it, commits a grave mistake.

“…every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.”—–George Monbiot,
Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.” Richard Glover, Sydney Morning Herald
“At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?” influential U.S. website (Talking Points Memo)
“An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm

Obviously these shrill propagandists are projecting their own inner fears of what is surely (and they know it) in store for them when their alarmist shrieking fails and the human damages of their agenda is tallied.

Let’s not mince words: Suggestion by authorities that the sun has no effect on climate is criminal. I would love to get them on the stand in a court of law under oath and ask them some very pointed questions. … Specifically, we would learn whether they are willing to lie under oath…. My suspicion is that they see their cause as being far above the rule of law and that they would lie without hesitation. We are dealing with dark characters. People have underestimated how dark. … I believe they would maintain the lies under oath. One cannot effectively & efficiently deal with such darkly deviant characters in the usual, straightforward manner. …I do mean criminal. We’re dealing with criminals whose operations are based in darkness. .

That’s the other side of the coin: J-N (not to be confused with J+N). Dickey & Keppenne‘s (1997) figure 3 illustrated both sides of the coin (a&b). J-N is lunisolar. J+N is solar. These are mass attractors. Does the mass carry the exact same amount of heat each cycle? 4D integrals say no. J-N is due to the lunisolar QBO gate at the equator:
stacked: http://imageshack.us/a/img9/7195/xu88.png
flashing: http://imageshack.us/a/img826/2792/p2i.gif
Sidorenkov’s (2009) section 8.7 gives the foundations. (link provided in my last comment above)
This is the DNA of the ‘stadium wave’. It’s fascinating watching how long it takes people to clue in. Human nature is a source of neverending entertainment. People are so incredibly strongly conditioned to believe that the spatiotemporal components of climate can never be understood that you can put hard, clean, black & white 1+1=2 evidence right in front of their faces and it won’t even register as meaningful. Truly fascinating: Out of some irrational, fearful instinct people unconsciously choose to deny the laws of conservation of angular momentum & large numbers when confronted with these observations. Human nature is every bit as fascinating as climate nature and the climate discussion has given ongoing fruitful opportunity to study the human nature of climate nature ignorance.

Mann wrote:
“Muller, who lacks any training or expertise in atmospheric science,…”

I’m not seeing any training in atmospheric science on Mann’s bio page:

Dr. Mann received his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Applied Math from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. degree in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University. His research involves the use of theoretical models and observational data to better understand Earth’s climate system.http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/index.php

Dr. Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, author of Dire Predictions &. Climate Wars has painted himself into a corner. No one can take him seriously any more.

Definitely the most absurd thing I’ve read yet in the “skept-o-sphere.”

Why do skeptics put up with cyber-bulling… Because sceptics are culturally resistant to seeing themselves as victims.

Seriously, that level of irony is a freakin’ work of art. “Skeptics” put up with bullying (in other words, they are victims) because they are culturally resistant to seeing themselves as victims? Someone who reads threads in the “skept-o-sphere” and sees poor wittle “skeptics” as being “bullied?”

My, it is as if you are blind to the actual arguments and can only reason in terms of an “us vs. them” type of discussion. Kind of like the discussion above about how “non skeptics” think more in terms of group membership…. Naahh!

Kind of like the discussion above about how “non skeptics” think more in terms of group membership….

Dude. Did you read the diatribes against Muller because he was disloyal to the “group?” Have you not read comment after comment about how is isn’t a true member of the group? Endless discussions about why he isn’t a “skeptic.”

She likes to mix it up. I think it’s counterproductive, but it certainly is her right.

The question is why does she portray herself as above the fray? Why is her concern about the counterproductivity of tribalism so selective? Why does she engage in the same behaviors as those she criticizes (selectively)?

Joshua, “The question is why does she portray herself as above the fray? ”
She has earned the right – you haven’t.

“Do you consider her stealth insult to be “polite?”
Most would castigate Mann for the phony that he is. I think Judith’s dig was aggressive for her. Given her class, that is all she is able to muster, thus far.

Muller’s other article on the pause is more centrist. He argues that “the pause” should be taken no more seriously than the hockey stick. Both give the wrong impression about climate variability, which is that it doesn’t affect the trend. Here he has made a good point. We should not expect no pauses, as implied to some, including him apparently, by the hockey stick, nor should we expect that a pause proves something that it doesn’t, which is an end to a long-term upward trend.

What the pause shows is that CO2 is not the only driver of climate. Something that was “consensus” just a few years back. Kind of like the claims that there was no MWP, even in Greenland, and that the Vikings were driven out due to overgrazing.

The pause can’t be put on a par with those until it shows up in a 30-year mean trend. It doesn’t. The first 15 years warmed faster and cancel the pause out. It doesn’t even show up if you take the last ten years average and subtract the ten before that, again because of very rapid warming just prior to the pause that the skeptics have recognized as a step. Even as they recognize steps, they don’t see that one is now due. In 1983 and 1998 there were especially large El Ninos. Why not suggest that 15 years later we may be due for another one?

Finally got Jim D, “The pause can’t be put on a par with those until it shows up in a 30-year mean trend.”
No 10,15 or 17 years for Jim D, no sirree, He is out the back door and heading for 30 years minimum,

Whats next, some predictions.
“someone limited in intelligence and technical knowledge” 50 years
FOMD 70 years
Gatesy Hm, it could be 200 or 500 years, or 5000. A bit hard to pin down with so many options.
Thanks Jim D for your honest opinion and sorry for joking about it. I have asked FOMD/WHT and RG for their minimum length of time for the pause to be significant and have never heard one peep out of them about it. Commitment is a funny thing when one is afraid to do it.
Personally I am quite happy with 10 years as a meaningful length of time for our current bone fide observations as originally espoused by Santer and many others before the pause went longer than 10 years

The CSALT model uses variables of CO2, pressure, solar radiance, LOD stadium waves, and aerosols and can account for the temperature since 1880 with standard error of 0.05C.

There is absolutely no way that any of these parameters other than CO2 can stray too far away from their historical mean values, which means that they can only add so much as a compensating fluctuation to form a pause.

The pressure is pinned to the sea-level value difference between two points. This can’t go too far from the mean.

The solar radiance is determined by sun spots and this value is known to only contribute about 0.05C and oscillates.

LOD stadium wave factor is slowly varying and there is clear indication that it is stable right now,

Volcanic aerosols are stable right now.

The pause can not sustain based on this model, which has worked for 130+ years.

“I have asked FOMD/WHT and RG for their minimum length of time for the pause to be significant and have never heard one peep out of them about it. Commitment is a funny thing when one is afraid to do it.”

Thanks Web good try,but while acknowledging a pause you have not “committed” to a time frame for meaningfulness. ie when, in how many years, would it, could it be significant enough to make you say, gee, my views on this might not be as right as I thought.
If you cared to nominate a time you may put some pressure back as commitment should work both ways.

ps the sun spots do not cause the temperature fluctuation of the sun’s output. They are a response to the temperature fluctuation and there is no reason that the sun’s temp has to stay at about 0.05C and oscillate around this. It could conceivably go higher or lower. Even a tiny change in this order of magnification would have massive effects on our surface temperature over thousands of years.

Yea, the pause is simply an artifact of fluctuations. The CSALT model can accurately predict the temperature to within 0.05C standard deviation over the last 130+ years. Right now, the fluctuation of SOI is essentially suppressing the CO2 rise temporarily but this can’t sustain indefinitely. The fluctuation is the sum of the components shown in the following chart — the minute the SOI spikes up, the pause is history:

It must rankle you that I have the keys to the kingdom in terms of understanding what is happening.

I start to read a post like the previous one from Greg as being consistent with skepticism – where someone offers something valuable… I don’t understand it at a technical level, but it seems sophisticated, and since my bro’ is in signal processing, I have to respect the field.

But then I read the crap that Greg offers about climate scientists not acknowledging that the sun affects climate. And I see him double-down on that nonsense. And I read other “skeptics” who seem knowledgeable run with that same fallacious line of reasoning, and I can’t help but feel that Greg’s entire line of argumentation is severely compromised.

Yes. Like when “skeptics” build arguments based on climate scientists saying that the science is settled. It undermines their contention that they are serious about their skepticism.

If someone as limited in intelligence and technical knowledge as myself can see gaping holes in the arguments being made by smart and knowledgeable people – then there is something wrong.

Mueller strikes me as somebody who made incorrect claims about something, realized that his claims were incorrect, but his ego doesn’t allow him to admit it. Instead he goes on a journey to save face.
Hmm, I don’t think I would hire him.

Jeff Masters of The Weather Underground: “as far as we can tell, the number of damaging tornadoes has not increased in recent years, though the quality of the data set is to poor to know for sure. This is largely due to the fact that we never directly measure a tornado’s winds–a tornado has to run over a building before we can make an EF-scale strength estimate, based on the damage.”

Curry: “Mann loses this argument. The undercounting of tornadoes is a problem prior to 1990 (worse undercounting as you go back in time); hence a decrease in recent hurricanes relative to historical values cannot be attributed to undercounting.”

Well it is true that the traditional tornado alley is in a part of the country that it is sparsely populated (i.e. a lot rural land with a number of farms) and I don’t know how much the population has increased in these rural areas, but I doubt it is significant. We can only detect actual tornadoes either by eyewitness or through damage (Doppler radar only detects potential). And we can only measure wind speed by damage . So I think there is a significant amount of uncertainty in the validity of the sampled data set,

“A List Of 23 Famous Obama Quotes That Turned Out To Be Broken Promises Or Cold-Hearted Lies
By Michael Snyder, on November 18th, 2013

Barack Obama takes one last look in the mirror before going out to take the oath of office

How many lies can one president tell and still retain any credibility? What you are about to see is absolutely astounding. It is a long list of important promises that Barack Obama has broken since he has been president. If he had only told a few lies, perhaps the American people would be willing to overlook that. After all, pretty much all of our politicians our liars. Unfortunately, many of the lies that Obama has told appear to have been quite cold-hearted in nature. For example, Barack Obama repeatedly made the promise that “you will be able to keep your health care plan” under Obamacare. But now we are learning that he knew that this was a lie all along. Not only that, the Democrats in Congress knew that this was a lie all along too. In fact, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, said the following when she was asked about Obama’s promise to the American people recently: “He should’ve just been specific. No, we all knew.” You can see video of her making this statement right here. The truth is that they all knew that millions upon millions of Americans would lose their current health care policies under Obamacare. They deliberately lied just so that they could get the law passed.”

Is it possible that Sen. Rand Paul’s Obamacare rant that recently went viral is actually wrong? After posting his comments on Tuesday, we did some more digging and found some information that calls it into question.

Those few minutes on stage encapsulated the promise and the peril of a brash and politically talented party crasher already deep into preparations for a 2016 presidential race. Paul’s positions—a combination of conservative, libertarian, and idiosyncratic—have the potential to excite and enlarge the Republican Party. His informal, engaging personality could attract the young voters Republicans need to survive. Indeed, he could grow into a Reaganesque game changer for his party—if he does not end up a victim of his own affinity for misinformation.

…
A new mega-well near the border, in the 2nd Bone Springs interval, boasts a peak 24-hour rate of 4,500 boepd and after 20 days, 3,700 boepd, with a 4600-foot lateral. (Note 2nd Bone Springs findings in table below compared with an earlier table. CXO has broken out the three Bone Springs intervals.) The well cost $6.8 million, has an expected ultimate recovery rate of 1 million barrels, and is expected to pay-out in less than six months. It is considered to be potentially a “historic Permian well.” The Bone Springs interval is a relative newcomer to the unfolding shale story.
…
Other firms have reported some outperforming wells such as Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) in the Midland Basin and Energen (EGN) in Reeves County, Delaware Basin.
…http://seekingalpha.com/article/1837322-delaware-basin-activities-furthering-conchos-permian-plans

Apache Corp (APA) is reported to have completely eliminated its reliance on freshwater in the South Permian region. When drilling Wolfcamp shale wells, the company is meeting all its water requirements by taking brackish water from the Santa Rosa aquifer, treating it, and recycling frack waste water from its wells. It costs Apache around 29 cents/barrel to treat water, but $2.50/barrel to have it trucked away for safe disposal. Considering millions of gallons are often needed to frack a single well, this is a huge cost reduction on each well drilled and a strong catalyst moving forward.
…
If Apache is saving $2/barrel with its treat and recycle method, that works out to a savings of around $320,000/well. With an inventory of 3,300 drilling locations in the Wolfcamp and Cline plays alone, that is a total potential savings of over $1 billion. So we are talking serious money here.
…http://seekingalpha.com/article/1858201-apache-fracking-without-fresh-water-to-cut-costs

Water usage for natural gas ( both in extraction and generation) is lower than other energy sources. And the move to using brines makes it even more attractive from the enviromental perspective. Of course Michael Mann doesnt get any of this.

I am unsure of the economics of brines, but I met a chap in Michigan who bought land, just to pump out the brine, salt out the minerals with NaCl, and sell of the mineral salt.
Do you know what sort of brines they have in the shale oil/gas areas?

Also, von Storch believes that the oceans could be warming up, but that there is very little data out there to confirm it.

Please. The linked article ends with this statement, with on supporting evidence whatsoever.

WHY does von Storch think this? With what part of the data does he disagree? People like Sydney Levitus have worked extremely hard to reconstruct ocean temperatures before ARGO, collecting and analyzing millions of samples over decades…. So why does von Storch disagree with this data?

Judith, when you give an easy link to some cheap shot like this, you are insulting people like Levitus who spend their career trying to determine changes in ocean heat content. It’s one reason why blogs like this are dangerous — it’s extremely easy to make such dismissals, but not so easy to make an intellectual argument that is worthy of the peer reviewed literature, that Levitus et al deserve.

David Appell,
von Storch’s thoughts are far more nuanced …
He makes that statement in the context of saying that too many research results are too quickly touted as fact – because they neatly explain a previously observed phenomenon. He feels that we should keep these results in the form of a “hypothesis” for longer – until they are more solidly supported by data.
Listening to him I sense that he feels the early publishing of research results makes a theory more vulnerable to second guessing and thus rejection by climate change skeptics. But that’s just my take on it.

“Also, von Storch believes that the oceans could be warming up, but that there is very little data out there to confirm it.”
I wonder what von Storch thinks the cause of sea level rise (3mm/year over 20 years) is if it isn’t mainly some combination of ice-sheet melt and ocean water warming, both of which require a persistent top of atmosphere energy flux imbalance. Could it be that the fish are becoming fatter or are peeing too much? Maybe the sponges are dying off?

I can read minds …
I agree with you about the cheap shot though. Gosselin takes snippets of von Storch’s words that seem to be skeptical to climate change out of context. The interview is very good and his views are rather philosophical. He absolutely supports AGW but at times expresses conservative views on how such research should be presented.

“We cannot draw any conclusions about “missing energy” in the system on the basis of differences between interannual variations in satellite net radiation and upper ocean heating rates from the current record. This is predominantly due to large uncertainties remaining, in both observing systems, and which needs to be understood, and reduced.”

Appell generally objects to the No Tricks Zone “extracts” of Von Storch and he is probably right about this issue. One would need a full transcript and hopefully one will become available.

The other part of the Appell persona here, the indignation, the name calling, the condescension is not helpful to me for one. He clearly doesn’t like what Judith is doing. The main design here is that Judith is making a contribution to the public discussion of climate science. She will make some mistakes in doing so. I’m not sure if this post is one of them or not, we will see. But if Appell wants to credibly rebut it, he needs more than what he has given so far.

#1 “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

#2 “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

#3 “We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care. Families will save on their premiums…”

#4 “I don’t want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be the president of the United States of America.”

#5 “We’ve got shovel-ready projects all across the country that governors and mayors are pleading to fund. And the minute we can get those investments to the state level, jobs are going to be created.”

#6 “And we will pursue the housing plan I’m outlining today. And through this plan, we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford—avoid foreclosure.”

#7 “I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

#8 “We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”

#9 “For people with insurance, the only impact of the health-care law is that their insurance is stronger, better, and more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”

#10 “We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years.”

#11 “Allow Americans to buy their medicines from other developed countries if the drugs are safe and prices are lower outside the U.S.”

#15 “Will eliminate all income taxation of seniors making less than $50,000 per year. This will eliminate taxes for 7 million seniors — saving them an average of $1,400 a year– and will also mean that 27 million seniors will not need to file an income tax return at all.”

#16 “We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans.”

#17 “If we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home, we will end this war. You can take that to the bank.”

#18 “Will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.”

#19 “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

#20 “We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism…. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, ‘Not this time….’”

#21 “We’ve got to spend some money now to pull us out of this recession. But as soon as we’re out of this recession, we’ve got to get serious about starting to live within our means, instead of leaving debt for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren.”

#22 “[T]oday I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay – and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”

#23 “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States.”

Judging by the most current financial disclosure statement by Rand Paul, he’s no gold bug. His 2011 Congressional disclosure statement filed in 2012, shows that he had assets worth between $433,025 to $1,295,000 and no liabilities. Of those assets, at most, he only had 15% in gold related stocks, probably less.

His father, on the other hand, had at least 65% of his portfolio in gold and silver related stocks, during the same period. If there is any indication of the differences in the thinking of Rand and his father, it may be in the structure of their portfolios. Ron is much more detail oriented, drilling down and owning specific gold stocks, while Rand does not get into as much detail. To the degree Rand owns gold positions, it is only through gold mutual funds. Can’t we say the same thing about Ron and Rand political positions?

To question the current high level of the DJIA can have its merits.
Most people including stockbrokers whose job it is to know, cannot on average drill down into the detail of individual stocks and display some winner picking insight.

One of my favorite Ron Paul quotes (probably second after when he talked about the feds fabricating the Korean conflict to boost the dollar):

–snip–

As you know, I have introduced, and other members have cosponsored, H.R. 7874, which is a comprehensive bill to place the United States on a full gold coin standard within two years of the date of its passage.

I believe such a standard to be not only desirable and feasible, but absolutely necessary if we aim to avoid the very real possibility of hyperinflation in the near future, and economic collapse.

–snip–

From 1981.

Dude’s been predicting “hyperinflation” around the corner for decades.

I love it when libertarians on climate blogs complain about other people being “alarmist.”

Joshua, “Dude’s been predicting “hyperinflation” around the corner for decades.”

A 1981 inflation adjusted dollar is worth about 2.6 times what today’s dollar is worth. Gold is about 2.7 times what it was in 1981. If a currency is tied to a commodity it generally holds its value. Silver would have been a more entertaining ride, but about the same now. Instead the US dollar was more unofficially tied to oil. The Euro broke that so for a while the Euro was worth almost two US dollars. Now that the US is producing more oil and the EU is trying to self destruct with it carbon standard, the euro and dollar are getting closer to par.

If you want to really smooth things out you can mix bag, silver certificates, gold dollars, platinum bonds, land trust bonds etc. etc. so you don’t have available reserves of one commodity limiting growth which once upon a time was the name of the game instead of having the Fed pick the next bubble, which in case you hadn’t noticed was real estate hyper-inflation followed by a slight correction with a few minor banking issues.

It boils down to fear – or at least, to emotion. After all these centuries, gold’s price still depends largely on how people feel about other investments, wether they be stocks, bonds, real estate or industrial commodities – and how they feel about the broader economic environment. “Gold is a place where people go when they are scared of other assets,” says Uri Landesman, president of the hedge fund Platinum Partners.

Joshua:
Dude’s been predicting “hyperinflation” around the corner for decades.
I love it when libertarians on climate blogs complain about other people being “alarmist.”

He is a libertarian. I don’t agree with his investment mix. Over weighting gold. But I think it’s just one his attributes. What is it that makes the dollar resilient to hyperinflation? I’d say confidence and economic fundamentals. If I recall correctly, when you are the Chairman of the Fed, you can control either unemployment or inflation in theory. Recent history might suggest they’re more worried about inflation. And perhaps another cause of less inflation of the dollar, is its sometimes role as the currency of last resort, similar to gold.

If I recall correctly, when you are the Chairman of the Fed, you can control either unemployment or inflation in theory. Recent history might suggest they’re more worried about inflation. And perhaps another cause of less inflation of the dollar, is its sometimes role as the currency of last resort, similar to gold.

That’s all fine – but it looks a bit like a squirrel.

He has been predicing “hyperinflation” with complete confidence, for decades, despite of, in fact because of, fed policies.

Gold retains its value not only in times of financial uncertainty, but in times of geopolitical uncertainty. It is often called the “crisis commodity,” because people flee to its relative safety when world tensions rise; during such times, it often outperforms other investments. For example, gold prices experienced some major price movements this year in response to the crisis occurring in the European Union. Its price often rises the most when confidence in governments is low.

“With the distribution of WOD05 there are now approximately 7.9 million temperature profiles and 2.7 million salinity profiles (as well as other profile data and plankton data) available to the international research community in a common format with associated metadata and quality control flags

The 7.9 million sensors readings are over the past 60 years and they were not all present at the same time. Color me unimpressed.

The Argo probe system is state of the art, and this network has produced more and better data than all has gone before. At any one time there are 3,600 sensors in the worlds oceans.
The area of the worlds oceans is 361 million sq km, and so each probe can be used to interrogate a surface of 1 million sq km and a volume of 1 billion cubic km of water.

There are at the moment 14,000 reading per month, so measuring the surface 500m of ocean is like measuring the surface land temperatures with just 200 temperature stations; ask Mosher how he would like to do a BEST average, global, temperature with just 200 mobile stations

It is note worthy that the data pre-Argo shows 0-700m ocean heating of approximately twice the post-Argo rate; that is, the better sensing system shows a slowing in the rate of heating.

I do however agree with one point, Sydney Levitus,is a great scientist and we should honor him for his work and drive, especially for his getting people to fund basic research and his tenacity in coming to grips with a very difficult subject area.

There is no perfect datum. There are no perfect data. In science you take what you can get, and what you are given, and you calculate with that, including a real and truthful accounting of its uncertainties.

Which is precisely what scientists like Levitus have done.

Their data has uncertainties, but even with them, they indicate a great deal of ocean warming.

” There are no perfect data. In science you take what you can get, and what you are given, and you calculate with that, including a real and truthful accounting of its uncertainties”

You are one of those people who are too stupid to know how stupid they really are.
You cannot have a truthful account of your uncertainties, because your bias influences your design and analysis.
Do you think that the people who synthesized, tested and marketed Thalidomide were evil or wrong in their safety estimates?
Just how do you estimate your unknown unknowns?

No. Just about all really important empirical work comes from crafting data collection methods with very clear intent and as much control as possible–not from endless recycling and raking through the ashes of old studies long gone cold.

Completely false. Climate science is not an experimental science, so you take whatever data about the past you can get. It doesn’t matter so much if you measure today perfectly — you need to measure the past as well. That means you have to deal with past, imperfect data and make the best of it.

I love it when people confidently assert that such-and-such is not an experimental science. It’s not even true about climate science; there actually are experimental studies that inform issues in climate science. A lot of the physics applied to the climate system is informed by both old and contemporary experimental results. If you were categorically correct, there would be no need to constantly refine measuring instruments and sampling protocols, but we know that they do. The use of proxies for past climate is about the only example that fits your assertion. Nothing else does. It’s certainly the case that all the physics in the GCMs is based on quantities measured either in laboratories or in the field using the very best methods and designs the empiricists can devise. What exactly do you think is in the GCM that is based on a non-experimental proxy measurement?

They do it once and for all? The procedure isn’t repeatable? You mean, there are important parameters in the GCMs that have only been measured once, and the procedure that measured those parameters cannot be repeated? You heard it here first, folks.

Denier?
Want to compare my scientific output against yours?
How many years at the coal-face have you had Jabba?
How many dynamic systems have you analyzed?
Unlike you, I know how damned hard it is to measure anything, to reproduce anything and why scientists can disappear up their own anuses when they get the Messianic complex that they now understand ‘it’.

Last time I flew to Israel, to visit my wife’s family, I sat next to this old Jewish guy. He had a tattoo on his arm, given to him by people who believed that science justified their social engineering.
You remind me of those arrogant social engineers.

David, all these measurements and no proof, If Leviticus conclusively proves that the heat has gone into the oceans [with no margin of or for error], then we would all have to believe it but not one expert you can trot out will confirm that.
Your comment “scientists like Levitus have done.Their data has uncertainties,”
Your hero “It’s a travesty that we do not know where the missing heat is” Hansen. If he doesn’t know, and he didn’t who would.
The IPCC ? ” It is likely’ I like that. It is likely I will win the lotto too.
Wheres the proof David, do your homework and don’t tell me that “The oceans swallowed it’ , please.

“There is a thin line between seeking more confirmation and plain denial.”
_____

You’re being kind. The line is not nearly so thin, but many on the other side of that line find it important to be seen as skeptics. No skeptic is 100% sure of anything– yet many would-be skeptics are 100% sure that we “puny” humans with our human carbon volcano couldn’t possibly be altering the climate.

There are several stages between denial and acceptance. The fourth stage is bargaining. Those that say “global warming is good” typify this stage, and are closer to acceptance than the denialists, while some others have only moved to anger, the second stage.

Starting in about 2003, though, a slowdown in heat buildup was observed in the ocean while greenhouse gases continued to build up in the atmosphere, trapping more heat. Six years later, Trenberth asked [pdf] in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, where was the missing heat? In his now famous hacked e-mail message, Trenberth lamented that our observation systems’ inability to resolve this issue was “a travesty.”

“The minerals resources sector is now the most heavily regulated industry in Australia, with mining approvals typically requiring consent from all three levels of Government.

Added to that there are extensive periods of public consultation, comprehensive environmental and social impact assessments, lodgement of environmental bonds or securities with governments and ongoing reporting and assessment to ensure that the operation remains entirely consistent with the heavily conditioned approval.

And layered on top of that again, almost all the States and Territories further restrict this process for approvals with additional policies designed to shield certain regions.

Mining approvals in Australia now typically take between five to seven years to complete and comprise a complex array of licences and approvals from a range of different government agencies. This includes mines departments, environmental protection agencies, heritage and native title/land rights authorities, wildlife conservation administrators, water licencing bodies and even departments of consumer and employee protection.

Further, if a project has the potential to impact on a matter of national environmental significance or Indigenous heritage, it is has to be assessed and approved by the Commonwealth.

All of this is undertaken separately to State and Federal Treasury’s considerations of their current and future receipt of taxes and royalties from the minerals sector. If Governments were only interested in revenue, no project would ever be rejected or so heavily environmentally conditioned.”

HR asks: “FOMD, like others I don’t get what you are talking about. … [Please be] more clear how does this paper make JC discussing climate science on this blog an irrelevance?”

It is a pleasure to respond to your request HR!

The intent of posting links to recent climate-change literature is to balance the regrettable (and increasing) tendency of skeptical websites to revisit the oldest controversies over-and-over, critiquing only the weakest (purely statistical) analyses of modern-day climate science.

The plain fact is that that nowadays, what Judith Curry calls “the strongest available climate-science” is deeply integrative:

Conclusion Climate-change skepticism that remains scientifically outdated, statistically grounded, mathematically weak, and ignorant of recent literature, is sufficiently irrelevant to real-world policy-making as to constitute itself a form of climate-change denialism.

TonyB focuses exclusively upon “Do you think that major volcanic eruptions are a substantial reason for the cooler 19th century?”

TonyB, doesn’t it concern you that an exclusive focus upon the statistical analysis of a cherry-picked set of poorly-documented (and thus endlessly-arguable) historical data-sets, combined with a systematic neglect of the modern synoptic climate-change literature, amounts to an narrow-minded embrace of denialist cognition?

I can tell you are wriggling when you don’t answer the question. There are many scientists who do nothing but look at the effects of volcanos. Perhaps you’d better tell THEM that their focus is too narrow and to stop cherry picking? Its the subject I want to focus on at present in order to better understand other parts of the climate system.

It follows several discussions on volcanos here and elsewhere. I have summarised them here by firstly referencing this link.

How long the effect is going to last is the subject of continued debate. In most cases the effect appears to be pretty short lived.”

Then looking at figure 3 from ‘one model one vote’ and also Figure 1 from the zielinski link, I commented;

“Am I reading the two graphs correctly that show major eruptions and temperatures? Surely there was already a temperature down turn BEFORE the eruptions?

I did some research previously on the 1258 ‘super volcano’ which was the subject of much discussion by Michael Mann and is said to have precipitated the LIA.

However, the temperature/weather had already deteriorated in the decade prior to the eruption but warmed up again a year after.”

Now, I have never heard any climate scientist say anything other than volcanic eruptions cause cooling. However, that would appear to be incorrect. A far as I can see all the major volcanic eruptions occurred well after the cooling down turn and could not possibly have caused them . In fact, using these two graphs you could argue that temperatures increased after the volcanic eruption.

As far as I am aware factoring in volcanic cooling especially during the 19th century is a key component of a climate model.”

Now Fan, perhaps you will answer the question-if you can.

What’s YOUR understanding of the impacts of a volcano and the longevity of these effects on the climate? If it can warm as well as cool where is this factored in to models?

“Do you think that major volcanic eruptions- such as tambora amongst many others- always cool the atmosphere and are a substantial reason for the cooler 19th century?”

______
This was for fan, but I hope you don’t mind me adding my thoughts. Major volcanic eruptions such as Tambora, etc. nearly always cool the atmosphere to some degree, but the location of the volcano and the state of the atmosphere at the time must be taken into account. Regarding the LIA cooling in general and the cooler 19th century, there seems to be two factors at work: 1) a general increase in volcanic activity throughout this period, punctuated by a few quite notable large eruptions, but the general overall increase in aerosols from multiple smaller and moderate volcanoes provided an increase to the optical depth of the stratosphere, reducing the net solar energy reaching the planet. 2) a general decrease in solar output highlighted by the Maunder and Dalton minimums.

Thus, both factors– increased aerosols and reduced solar– were part of the negative forcing during the LIA. Your insistence on looking at just a few of the major well-known volcanoes of the period (and their shorter–term immediate effects) and neglecting to understand that a general incease in global volcanic activity also goes through cycles and you can therefore get centuries during which the optical depth of the atmosphere is increased.

Specfically regarding the 1257 eruption of Mt. Rinjani. You’ve sited many times the cooling beginning before this large eruption. Have you considered the fact that there was already a general increase in global volcanic activity prior to the huge Mt. Rinjani eruption? Aerosols were already increasing in the stratosphere. Mt. Rinjani was simply the largest and most notable of eruptions, and marks a general period of increased global volcanic activity that lasted well into the 19th century.

Just to follow up on some of the effects of the 1257 eruption, though a general global cooling can be observed, there can be warming in regionalized areas related to a warming of the polar regions immediately after a large eruption. Regarding the 1257 eruption:

“Though the eruption was equatorial, its impact was felt and noted around the world. “The climate was disturbed for at least two years after the eruption,” Lavigne said. Evidence of this was found in studies of tree rings that revealed abnormal growth rates, climate models, and historical records from as far afield as Europe.”

Medieval chronicles, for example, describe the summer of 1258 as unseasonably cold, with poor harvests and incessant rains that triggered destructive floods—a “year without a summer.” The winter immediately following the eruption was warmer in western Europe, however, as would be expected from high-sulfur eruptions in the tropics. The team cites historical records from Arras (northern France) that speak of a winter so mild “that frost barely lasted for more than two days,” and even in January 1258 “violets could be observed, and strawberries and apple trees were in blossom.””

Well at least you don’t dance around the subject like Fan does. You say;

“Your insistence on looking at just a few of the major well-known volcanoes of the period (and their shorter–term immediate effects) and neglecting to understand that a general increase in global volcanic activity also goes through cycles and you can therefore get centuries during which the optical depth of the atmosphere is increased.”

No, that is not what I have done. If you had looked at the links you would have seen that many volcanos were graphed and the MAJOR ones specifically identified. The major ones on the whole tend to emit very many times the material of the lesser ones and are therefore responsible for significantly altering the optical depth to an amount that will impact on the climate.

However, it would be my observation that temperatures had already altered prior to this ‘topping up’ of the background optical depth level by the major volcanos to an amount that would precipitate the modelled changes.

It is difficult to see volcanos in general as having the (continual) long term dramatic cooling effect that is claimed for them. I can find no evidence of significant volcanic eruption around 1257 other than the one you cite.

It would probably be useful for you to read some of the ice core studies that have been done related to volcanic dust and the associated alterations in stratospheric optical depth over the past thousand years. Combining the general background increase in optical depth from about 1200-1900 (punctuated by a few large spikes) with the general declines in solar output (punctuated by the Maunder and Dalton) provides a very nice record of major causes of external climate forcing during the period.

“I have Dr Mann’s paper in front of me whereby he tried to justify the inability of tree rings to pick up the effects of the eruption.”
____
Is this the 2001 paper you are referring to? A bit outdated– much research has transpired since that time– especially related to the 1257 large eruption. Effects from this eruption have been found in tree rings.

If you go to ‘volcano info’ there is a spread sheet that can be downloaded of all eruptions.

I am not sure that in the historic records I can see the cooling effect suggested, in as much the climate had already altered prior to the major eruptions which changed the background optical depth sufficiently to have an effect.

Are you saying that if in the modern age we had a similar level of climate activity as the 1200 to 1900 period that our climate would cool by 0.7F or similar?

“Are you saying that if in the modern age we had a similar level of climate activity as the 1200 to 1900 period that our climate would cool by 0.7F or similar.”
_______

Of course, in our “modern age” we need to balance the effects of higher GH gases against the effects of aerosols (both natural and anthropogenic). It is hard to estimate exactly what effects an extended period of higher aerosols (like several centuries) would have against the positive forcing from higher CO2, methane, and N2O levels. Certainly the cooling effects would not be as great from the aerosols with these markedly higher GH gas levels.

You said;
‘Is this the 2001 paper you are referring to? A bit outdated– much research has transpired since that time– especially related to the 1257 large eruption. Effects from this eruption have been found in tree rings.”

2001? No, that’s ancient history. I was referring to his 2012 paper in Nature Geoscience where Dr Mann bemoaned the fact that tree rings didn’t pick up the temperature change of the 1257/8 event

I am not sure we have had an article here on volcanos and their impact on the climate system. Perhaps Judith could provide one?

The further one goes back before 1900, the more the data is governed by epistemic fluctuations caused by poor coverage. One can see that with the BEST data going back to 1750 — just look at the error bars.

And regarding the 1260 European flagellant movement this article refers to, indeed quite interesting so close to the 1257 mega volcano and the cold summers that followed in Europe, bringing hardships that many saw as punishment from God. What better way to atone than self-flagellation:

Webster, “The further one goes back before 1900, the more the data is governed by epistemic fluctuations caused by poor coverage. One can see that with the BEST data going back to 1750 — just look at the error bars.”

Of course it does. That doesn’t mean disregard, just be careful. If you look at the southern hemisphere the data gets pretty uncertain prior to 1950 if you try to go all the way to the poles. By limiting the range to 65S-65N you get a little better confidence.

As a check I took Best max, min and average and scaled to remove the amplification and I have a fair extension of SST back to 1750. Using the absolute value I re-baseline and removed the full seasonal cycle to get a more uniform variance.

When you have questionable data you just use as many double checks as you can, you don’t just ignore it.

You can see both the solar and volcanic influences in the advance and retreat of this glacier. Note the start of a rapid advance around the time of the mega-volcanic eruption of 1257, with that Advance being just the first wave during the beginnings of the LIA. It also reaches maximum extents around 1660 (Maunder) and 1820 (volcanic and Dalton) but by far the biggest increase in extent occurred beginning from around 1260 and lasting to 1380 or so.

Webster, “Tambora is pretty clear from the BEST data even with the great uncertainty in the surrounding data points.”

Yep and scaling BEST to NH SST gives you a rough estimate of the impact on SST. The chart R. Gates just posted shows estimate of associated glacial advance and retreat that you can get a rough feel for in BEST by comparing Tmax and Tmin.

I even combined that with the Oppo IPWP to see how well that fit. Still too much uncertainty to draw many conclusions, but there looks to be about 0.2 to 0.35 C of solar/volcanic recovery that is being added to AGW forcing impacts depending on you choice of LIA ended periods.

Gates, That paper got me started with trying to extend SST using BEST with the amplification removed as a proxy. The paper is still in discussion though and Crowley et al. volcanic is pretty new so who knows, but I am still sticking with my estimated LIA recovery impact until something convincing materializes cause the timing and rate of OH uptake just don’t match very well.

captd, more of a Holocene recovery than an LIA recovery, don’t you think, when you put it in the context of the size of the temperature rise in the context of the last 10000 years? What would cause a Holocene recovery when the downward trend due to Milankovitch was expected to continue past the LIA? The big picture is important to see.

JimD, “captd, more of a Holocene recovery than an LIA recovery, don’t you think, when you put it in the context of the size of the temperature rise in the context of the last 10000 years? What would cause a Holocene recovery when the downward trend due to Milankovitch was expected to continue past the LIA? The big picture is important to see.”

The precessional cycle just shifts from NH to SH, With 65N max you get a higher probability of glacial melt but lower ocean heat uptake. With 65S max you get more ocean heat uptake and a greater probability of of glacial advance. People forget though you have precessional spring and fall, where you have warmer spring one period and warmer fall the other period. A warmer fall would lead to greater probability of accumlation with the fallowing milder spring and summer, and the warm spring would lead to a greater probability of spring and early summer rain which is pretty effective at snow melting.

Since the SH oceans and base CO2 started rising about 5000 years ago we are in the maximum ocean heat uptake mode of the precessional cycle. That is why there are 4000 to 5000 year recurrent warming pulses in the paleo record and the Bond Event and D-O oscillations. It is a dynamic system with a tad more complexity than many admit.

What I find interesting in the Crowley data is the amount of volcanic aerosols collectively released during the 13th century seems to be greater than the total from the previous 5 centuries combined. Of the course the 1257 mega-eruption was the biggest, but the century as a whole was far more active than the previous 5. The MWP had declining aerosols in the stratosphere overall, but clear skies came to sudden end in the 13th Century. Not saying this was the only factor in the ensuing LIA, but it certainly seem likely as one big factor.

captd, not sure if you were agreeing or not, but the current phase of the Milankovitch cycle is supposed to favor Arctic sea ice, but that seems to be going away instead. Any warming relative to the millennium average is a reversal of what the Holocene should be doing.

JimD, “captd, not sure if you were agreeing or not, but the current phase of the Milankovitch cycle is supposed to favor Arctic sea ice, but that seems to be going away instead. ”

That depends on who you talk to. Since the north Atlantic gets a huge boost from the ACC influence on the THC, the warmer Arctic ocean should favor more accumulation of land mass based snow and ice not sea ice. If you have a large Arctic sea Ice extent you would have less accumulation. Glaciers are land based based and man has gotten pretty good at clearing snow, intentionally and unintentionally.

The LIA appears to be a separate issue related to volcanic and weak solar impact and the MWP looks to be just a “normal” period for the precessional cycle. Since land amplifies the temperature change, they are mainly NH events though there is SH impact with inconsistent lags.

“What would cause a Holocene recovery when the downward trend due to Milankovitch was expected to continue past the LIA?”

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This is exactly the point of the general validity of the hockey stick. Since the Holocene climate optimum, the general trend has been to a slow cooling, with periods that varied up (Roman Warm, MWP) and varied down (LIA), but the general shaft of the hockey stick had been trending slowly down. Now we have a period that is trending up in a way that basic physics, climate models, and the vast majority of scientists say is at least partially an anthropogenically forced upward “blade” in that hockey stick. This doesn’t seem to sit well with certain memeplexes,

FOMD, I have found that application of thermodynamic fundamental and statistical modeling that is a touch “free form” have lead to generations missing their potential to excel. Perhaps it is time to revisit some of the basic “statistical” methods.

While I am sure you have great confidence in the abilities of scientists, the Tyrkeydryas, a period lasting until 2008 when the USDA finally reduced the safe “minimum” internal temperature for poultry, costs generations the satisfaction of an enjoyable family holiday meal by over exaggerating the threat of Salmonella which only requires temperatures of 160F for 30 seconds to kill. To be on the “safe” side, the USDA had mandated poultry be cooked to a 180F internal temperature.

Since you are so sure that the state of science using linear no threshold models is well, remember to be on the “safe” side this Thanksgiving Day and use the 180F poultry rule.

The papers do not do what you claim of them. (1) they do not support your claim that understanding climate change is simple; (2) they contain no new information about climate or climate change. The evidence is in the papers.

I find the following
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David Appell | November 24, 2013 at 2:07 am |

That means you have to deal with past, imperfect data and make the best of it.
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To me this goes to the very heart as to whether CAGW is merely a hypothesis. In order to arrive at a conclusion, using physics, it is essential to show that the information available is good enough to actually solve the problem. It is not sufficient to state that the information is the best we have.

There is no purely socialistic, communistic, capitalistic, or libertarian country; but Texas comes as close as any to some combination of capitalistic/libertarian principles.

“A recent TIME Magazine cover features an engaging collage of the 50 states reassembled to fit within the boundaries of Texas. With a growing number of solid-paying jobs, affordable housing and low taxes, “the Lone Star State is America’s Future,” declares economist and writer Tyler Cowen.

As a “Texa-Can,” I think the article gives compelling insight into what I’ve personally witnessed during my 20 years living in the states, which is very different from my experience living and working in Canada, where big government and overregulation abound.

I agree with the writer when he says there are “lessons Texas has to teach.” For example, states and cities could deregulate building development “so that rents and home prices could be much lower,” says Cowen. Or occupational licensing could be “scaled back” so that it is not so onerous to start applying one’s skill in the work force.

Notably, “a little more freedom in strategically targeted areas – that is, a little more Texas-could go a long way,” writes Cowen.

Whereas excessive regulations have often diluted the efforts of entrepreneurs and resulted in fewer innovations, lower profitability and less job creation, Texas is quickly becoming the nation’s poster child of how companies, communities and individuals flourish when allowed to operate under a more business-friendly atmosphere.”

Publicly traded corporations are not people with an ethical sense, even if people are involved in working them, and some of them have an ethical sense.

Wall Street corporations are machines for optimizing profit. We benefit from their production immensely. On the whole it is by far the best system for enhancing human well-being ever implemented.

But government is a crucial component of the system. We control them only by setting and enforcing rules for their operation. Appealing to their conscience is a Canute-like delusion. They will happily fire anyone whose conscience gets in the way of their simple clear-cut mission. We collectively must provide the ethical constraints through regulation.

Willard, I am a bit surprised you have such good things to say about corporations.

Regulation should be very measured and well considered.

When it comes to the legal status of corporations, I think it shouldn’t be considered the same as that of a citizen. Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to lobby Congress or any other aspect of government. Instead, corporations should be allowed to address Congress only via public, televised hearings. In return for the loss of lobbying, business taxes should be minimized to no more that 5%, or something like that. This will attract companies to the US, which is the country I am considering here, and create jobs.

The citizens will then have to bear the burden of the legislation created by those they send to Washington.

This scheme seems right in that it places responsibilities and burdens where they belong, on the shoulders of voters.

You might be a bit more surprised to learn that my previous comment was from a Texan, Michael Tobis, jim2.

Here might be one way to simplify taxation:

> Land value. If we want a real overhaul/simplification of the tax code, the way to do it is to tax land value. It might be the only tax we need. No sales tax. No income tax. No payroll tax to fill a Social Security trust fund. No corporate income tax that, as we can plainly see, offshores profits. No need to tax labor and industry at all. Just tax the stuff that humans had nothing to do with creating, and therefore have no basis to claim ownership over at all. You’ll find that almost all of it is “owned” by the fabled 1 percent.

That way, old couples who scraped pennies all their life to buy a small plot of land with a house on it will lose it when they lose a job or have to retire. Great plan, that. IIRC, Texas does tax land based on its value.

Willard – I continue to advocate a simple negative income tax or a derivative thereof that will simultaneously collect taxes and provide a social safety net. It has the huge additional bonus of being much more simple than the maze of current regulations. I think you have to admit that simple regulations gives fewer toe-holds to lawyers leaching off the legislative system.

Like everything else, regulations should be made as simple as possible, jim2, but not simpler.

Some food for thought:

> US Governments could scrap their bad taxes and fund public services out of community-created rents. One professor of economics calculates that income of the average American family would rise by $6,300. And yet, governments refuse to audit their fiscal performance to disclose the negative impact of political decisions on the economy. This denies citizens the information needed to make informed choices at elections.

(Jim2): I’m not necessarily endorsing the views expressed in this article, but it is weather/climate related. And, I am interested in the intersection of climate and the economy. I believe in the Vail comment, he didn’t mean “ample,” but maybe “skimpy” instead.

“Quickly, we still feel that this winter may be one of the top 5 coldest of the last 20 years or so, and a lot will depend on snow cover, which tends to insulate the ground. Stronger radiational cooling (under clear night skies–where snow cover exists) can occur at night which allows the long wave radiation of the sun to back into space. We have had certain parts of the U.S. in a snow drought the last 2 winters and this has never happened before. Two years ago, we saw (for example), Vail Resorts stock (MTN) fall some 10-20%, in part due to the in ample snowfall at almost everyone of their ski resorts. This year, may be quite a contrast with much more improved U.S. ski conditions.

Until late last winter, Chicago, Illinois went something like 20 months or so without a snowfall greater than 6 inches. I cannot recall this ever happening before. I am big believer in “cycles” and history would suggest that snowfall will be above normal in the Midwest this winter.
(Click to enlarge)
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This solar maximum is one of the weakest since the Maunder Minimum Days in the early 1800’s. (. I do not expect the severe “mini ice age” type cold that was observed then, in part due to Global Warming (man’s emissions and industrialization over the years). The upcoming solar activity the next few years, will probably not be as weak as back then. Nevertheless, global warming aside, the potential does exist for more frequent colder winters, particularly than the record warm ones, observed in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s”

jim2, you write “The upcoming solar activity the next few years, will probably not be as weak as back then. ”

I know it is largely guess work at the moment, but we do have a prediction for the value of Rz for SC25 from Livingston and Penn. They predict a value of 7. If that is not in Maunder minimum territory, I don’t know want is.

Michael Mann is beginning to remind me of Sen. Joe McCarthy, of McCarthyism. When will we have the person who stands up to him, as Joseph Welsh finally did at a Senate hearing, and says to Mann, “At long last, sir, have you no decency?”

(Jim2):Speaking of Nazi-like behavior, like spying on citizens; we have the NSA, the IRS, other Federal Government agencies, and now this from a state:

From the article:

In Wisconsin, dozens of conservative groups and allies of Gov. Scott Walker are undergoing political intimidation from the left at the hands of a special prosecutor.

Subpoenas have been issued demanding correspondence and donor information of right-leaning organizations and individuals and raids have been conducted resulting in law enforcement officers taking computers and files in a secret investigation, according to reports.

It continues, “Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand ‘all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications’ both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees. The groups include the League of American Voters, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Americans for Prosperity—Wisconsin, American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, Friends of Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin.”

The WSJ says the latest actions are taking place under Wisconsin’s John Doe law, which makes it difficult for the groups involved to defend themselves publicly.

The law, “Bars a subpoena’s targets from disclosing its contents to anyone but his attorneys. John Doe probes work much like a grand jury, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches, while the gag orders leave the targets facing the resources of the state with no way to publicly defend themselves.”

The orders reportedly began in the office of Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf just days before Democrat Mary Burke announced that she’d be running for governor of the state. Landgraf works for Milwaukee County Democratic District Attorney John Chisholm — who led a similar effort against Wisconsin conservatives and Gov. Walker in the past. This is the second such “John Doe” investigation in just three and a half years.

From the article:
But scientists are watching the sun carefully to see whether cycle 24 is going to be an aberration — or if this solar calmness is going to stretch through the next cycle as well.

“We won’t know that for another good three or four years,” said Biesecker.

Some researchers speculate this could be the start of a prolonged period of weak solar activity.

The last time that happened, during the so-called “Maunder Minimum” between 1650 and 1715, almost no sunspots were observed. During the same period, temperatures dropped sharply on Earth, sparking what is called the “Little Ice Age” in Europe and North America.

As the sunspot numbers continue to stay low, it’s possible the Earth’s climate is being affected again.

But thanks to global warming, we’re unlikely to see another ice age. “Things have not started to cooling, they just have not risen as quickly,” Biesecker said.

“Joseph Stromberg writes at the Smithsonian that one afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world. ‘Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk,’ writes Fallon. ‘I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological.’ When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

Hows does
– the total amount of money governments forcefully extract from the public to pay for climate science (almost all of it dedicated to fostering alarmism, since this will make tax increases easier to sell) and supporting fields

JC message to Michael Mann: …. You continue to damage the credibility of climate science in ways that you apparently can’t imagine.

Wasted words, sadly. In common with much of the the alarmist mainstream – only more so – Mann cares not a whit about science itself, only how he can use its name to further his own agenda, and those of his paymaster.

A desperate, short term, stance, to be sure. And, given enough time, self-defeating. The basic alarmist race on, is to get CO2 taxation and regulation entrenched, and vital to government finance, soon enough to politically head off a broad realisation that whole AGW scenario has been massively overhyped.

I think von Storch talks a lot of common sense. In particular the role of CO2 is overplayed. After all, CO2 is complex and thermodynamically is many different molecules whose individual properties. even in quantum physics are not fully understood. For example, the Equipartition law breaks down at normal atmospheric temperatures, and the 14.99 micron line, probably dominates, but that is saturated according to BOM papers (See my website underlined above).

Take a simple paradox about CO2. At 25C CO2 has a specific heat of 36, whereas N2 is 29, but N2 is about 70% of the troposphere, but CO2 < 1%, so why does CO2 absorb so much heat, enough to change climate ? According to quantum theory there ought to be a pause in temperature when a high proportion of CO2 molecules in the troposphere reach a certain temperature. Is that the cause of the present pause?

From the article:
Obama described himself “not a particularly ideological person,” saying he is passionate about his values but is practical about how to achieve them. He attacked House Republicans for being what he considered overly partisan.

Incredible hutzpah from Michael Mann, who comments on Muller’s supposed “lack of qualification to speak on climate science”, when Mann himself is a Geologist, and has no qualifications in climate science himself!
Robert Holmes

Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

“America is not an oligarchy… A Republic must answer to the people,” Sessions said today, in a direct response to President Barack Obama’s latest effort to get wealthy California CEOs to increase their support for his unpopular push for increased immigration.

“Congressional leaders must forcefully reject the notion, evidently accepted by the president, that a small cadre of CEOs can tailor the nation’s entire immigration policy to suit their narrow interests,” Sessions declared in a populist statement that contradicts the media’s image of Republican coziness with CEOs.

Sessions’ statement was released shortly before Obama used a San Francisco speech to ask friendly high-tech CEOs in California to revive his failing effort to pass an immigration-boosting bill.

NEWSMAX: The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for “death panels,” which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won’t, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

Can you imagine The Washington Post publishing a guide to how to survive your relatives’ negative questions about the war in Iraq? On Monday, Sarah Kliff of the Post’s Wonkblog posted “A guide to surviving Obamacare debates at Thanksgiving.” That’s assuming you’re getting armed to defend Obamacare just like a good Postie.

“This Thanksgiving, it’s a pretty safe bet that debates over Obamacare will be just about as central as turkey,” Kliff wrote. “As Wonkblog readers hit the road and head home, we didn’t want to leave you totally unprepared.” Don’t let the Ted Cruz-heads ruin your meal:

For example, your parents shouldn’t think Obamacare is finished: “The thing is, the health-care law includes a number of safeguards meant to mitigate the impact of lousy enrollment and make it a bit easier for insurance companies to weather the first few years.”

Grandpa shouldn’t worry about death panels: “There is an Independent Payment Advisory Board, which would be allowed to recommend payment cuts for doctors who serve Medicare patients. This board is not allowed to deny patients’ care; they only get to tinker with reimbursement rates. On top of that, the IPAB isn’t going into effect this year– or in the foreseeable future. That’s because it only kicks in when health-care costs are growing faster than the rest of the economy, and right now they’re growing at about the exact same rate. So, at least until Thanksgiving of next year, there is no chance of any panel changing his benefits.”